The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Room 4. From the Cycle Secrets: After the Blast

Hi—hello, sweets. Here—give us a kiss. M-mua. Why are you all so, sort of… discombobulated? You goof, of course everything’s fine, better than ever. Yurko dropped me off right at the door, just like I said on the phone, and what did you have to dread? (Such a stupid way to use that word—he says dread whenever he means worry, and I can’t seem to break him of this habit. Dread, by the way, is a transitive verb: One has to dread something, like war or famine, and if one is talking about someone, then one can worry, fret, brood, agonize, lose sleep, and dozens of other synonyms, but who speaks like that anymore?)

Here, hang up my coat, would you please? M-m-m—what is that smell? Hol-y mol-y, what is going on here?—is someone coming? Wow! Look at all this stuff; it’s like a five-star restaurant in here, flowers and all…. You—you are really something…. Can I taste it? Straight from your big skovoroda here? Okay, your skillet, whatever, but I must point out that the name of Ukraine’s greatest thinker was, in fact, Skovoroda, so it’s a perfectly good word…. Alright, alright—quiet as a mouse, watch me, z-zip; I’m out of your way, going to wash my hands. Or should I go ahead and shower for such a romantic occasion? Dress for dinner? And perfume myself with something fabulously sexy? By the way, did you know that of all smells men find vanilla the most arousing—don’t you think this smacks of some sort of infantile fixation on their mommies’ cookies? No, really, I read it somewhere—not about fixation, about vanilla; I figured out the fixation part all by myself, with the help of my towering intellect, what else? O-oh… Aidy! That’s not where the intellect is… not even a woman’s, let go! Very well, good sir, if you find intellectual women so irresistible, I shall henceforth be known by my new pseudonym: Daryna Skillet. Pretty catchy, no? I’ll get myself a column in Women’s Life. About the big stuff, and such. Only no one would ever know what a “skillet” is…. Aidy, you lummox, did you not get shampoo at the store again?

Chianti? I like that! I like it a lot. (Such a guy thing to put on this whole show, with wine and flowers, and then forget to get shampoo, which ran out two days ago!) Looks like a decent bottle too—2002—nicely done, Mr. Sommelier…. Oh, come on, the candles—that’s too much, that’s like something they’d tell you to do in Women’s Life—have you been reading that crap with a flashlight under the covers? Sure, over in that drawer—there should be a new pack. Yep, that one. Are you supposed to eat this with a fork or a spoon? Aidy, will you get a move on—I’m starving! Oh, it’s the candleholder you wanted to show me? Oops, I’m sorry, I got distracted by the candles—so, yeah, let me see… cool…. What is it, copper? Bronze, huh. And how do you clean it? Or is supposed to be this… pickled color? More like mold on a pickle, actually—that’s exactly the color, isn’t it? Super. I love it. Weighs a ton, too! Wow… it’s like in that Lesya Ukrainka story where the lady companion cracks the old baroness’s skull with a candelabra just like this! The one in the story is bronze, too. If you take a good aim, and really swing it… no kidding. A multifunctional piece. Alright, where are those candles? Let’s have the picture complete. Hang on, let me turn off the lights… uh-huh. Doesn’t go with our kitchen at all, but in a large house somewhere in the suburbs, where you could put it on a marble mantle—sure, it’ll look great. Or like, in a dining room, in the middle of an oak table the size of a tennis court….

Have a buyer yet? And how much do you charge for this beauty? Some more, please, I haven’t eaten…. So is that what’s paying for the banquet? Mm-mm, this is great! Say it again? Gnocchi? I get it—it’s like galúshki, only Italian…. Thank you, that’s good for now, or I’ll get wasted on an empty stomach… mm-mm. Potato dough? And then what—I’ve got spinach, cheese, garlic—and something else…. Whatever it is; it’s fantastic. And you made it all yourself? With your crafty little hands. See, Aidy, it’s like I said: you only get better with time…. Thank you! Who’s the buyer—that big fat marmot of yours with piggy eyes? No, I actually like him—you can tell the dude’s pretty sharp and not completely without taste. He sounds like he’s really into antiques and that tells you something right there; he’s not like all the other ones, the ones that buy music halls for their sluts… yep, and TV stations. You just had to rub that in, didn’t you? Alright—cin cin! Nope, prosit is German, and we’re drinking Chianti, so you gotta say it in Italian…. Smell that! This wine’s alive and kicking, I tell you what.

(Please, I can’t cry now, not now—he’s been so sweet, I don’t deserve all this—and why do I have to wind myself up like this. I’m like a vibrator, pardon my French, with the off switch busted—just buzzing, buzzing all the way home, and why, one wonders? So what, he had a dream? People dream things all the time—it’s just a dream, nothing special about it; so what if his subconscious replaced Vlada in my footage with his great-aunt Gela? Put a known entity in place of the unknown one, that’s perfectly natural—all it means is that he thinks about me even in his sleep, looks for me, feels where I am and what I am doing at the time—because he loves me, my Adrian, sweetheart, sunshine, darling….)

You know what? Your ears move when you chew. I swear they do! Do like this… see, see! That’s hilarious. Not true at all—not everyone. What, now you’re gonna say mine do, too? No, I don’t believe you, wait, no, let me see it in the mirror….

(Why did I forget—how could I forget, so it only now comes back to me: Vaddy—that was how Vlada addressed her Vadym, not in public, of course. God forbid. And not when she spoke about him in the third person—she was always fastidiously proper, buttoned-up like a graduate of a young ladies’ pensione, not for her the vulgar familiarities of mere mortals—she always referred to him by his full name, and I only heard this domestic one once or twice, when she let it slip accidentally, like when you lean forward too far, and a button comes undone on your blouse, and everyone glimpses your underwear. One of those times may have been the night when the two of them came to visit, and Vadym brought a bottle of Courvoisier, which he proceeded to drink by himself because Vlada and I preferred wine. Something irked her enough that she forgot herself for a moment and addressed Vadym as she did at home, in private—“Vaddy!”—followed by something really sharp, angry, nothing like the nice-but-firm tone that women use to put a check on husbands who may be enjoying themselves a bit too much, those half-jokes designed to preserve the company’s good spirits and decorum. To hell with decorum! This was raw, this would make you look away to avoid staring at the exposed patch of underwear, and since I was the only one present and had absolutely nowhere else to look, I think I giggled or blurted something inappropriate. I don’t remember what exactly, only how awkward it was…. Had we been alone, without Vadym, had he gone to the bathroom, or out to the balcony for a smoke, everything would’ve been cleared up right there and then, but Vadym sat between us, rock-solid, like he was bolted down to the floor, chair and all, like the bed meant for the next victim in The Hound of the Baskervilles—sat there like it was his singular mission not to leave Vlada and myself alone even for a minute, no matter what, even if his bladder burst, and this monumentally benevolent solidity of his transformed our girlfriend chirping, whether or not it contained any trifling dissonance or mutual concern, into a sort of organic white noise, little waves lapping innocently at the foot of the rock, too insignificant to cause the rock any manner of discomfort.

Before that night I hadn’t had much opportunity to observe powerful men at close range—men with the kind of great power that comes from great amounts of money. All my previous experience dictated that a man brought by his paramour to be checked out by her girlfriend should fan his tail like a peacock and deploy the full arsenal of his charms, real and imagined, so I was ill-prepared to deal with the strategic advantage Vadym had instantly gained on us by holding down his position at the table, next to his cognac, and maintaining the indulgent expression of a charitably minded giant. He had complete and undeniable control over the terrain on which his relationship with Vlada unfolded and did not allow me a single peek into that realm—left Vlada and me in the dust like greenhorns, to put it simply.

Could this be precisely what she loved about him—the cold-bloodedness of a professional player, the chess-master’s logic applied to human pieces, and the fierce, single-minded focus on the results, which artists so chronically lack? An artist is totally different; he or she is forever doomed to wandering, mind and body, in tangential details, sinking into obscure complexities, into colors and shades, patches of knitting and shards of porcelain, and put before people of action, with their unwavering pursuit of “Ready! Aim! Fire!” and the jackpots hit as a consequence, must inevitably feel like a teenager in adult company—and that’s exactly how I felt with Vadym that night.

Vlada had to have felt that way, too, and for a lot longer, only she thought it was really cool—we’re always attracted to those whose souls ooze vital enzymes we lack most desperately ourselves. Actually, I don’t even know why Vlada wanted to see me that time: something must have been grating on her, something she’d come to doubt already, but somehow we spent the whole five hours conscientiously discussing sociopolitical issues—Kuchma and Gongadze, the shake-ups at the top and the rein-tightening we felt in television, the Venice Biennale, and how profoundly Ukraine managed to fuck it up, and what a redneck pig-farm manager our deputy PM for humanitarian programs showed himself to be—all those things that Ukrainians always talk about, whether they’re friends or just met each other a minute ago, forever marveling at the breakneck speed with which their ne’er-do-well country hurtles off yet another cliff, like the farmers in the joke about the cart full of melons that breaks on their way to the market and they stand there, gaping at all their melons rolling down the hill, and one says to the other, “Hey, look, the striped one’s ahead.”

That’s how we spent that night—bemoaning whatever striped things were getting ahead—even though beyond all that usual nonsense, Vlada—and by extension, I—did sense something unsettling, unsolved, something that must have been the reason for her bringing Vadym over. Something that made her seek out, hope secretly for a moment of truth, for that late-night hiccup in personal machinery when, warmed with alcohol and easy banter, one feels the need to call off one’s internal guards, loosen one’s tie for a moment, and become oneself—for the alchemic brew that induces confessions, unlocks closets, pulls out drawers, drags up long-buried secrets and extracts declarations of old, age-old love—or equally old envy—all those stunning stories you never even suspected to be hidden right under your nose, like lions sleeping in savannah grass; such séances don’t last long, a witch’s count—from the first roosters till the second—but they are the zenith of every party, its catharsis. A party without them is like sex without an orgasm; they are the living knots that make the threads of friendship stronger, and if someone only taught those poor Americans not to go home at ten, but to hang around for two or three hours longer and let things take their course, they’d save a fortune on therapy.

They left right after midnight that time because Vadym had to fly out, at some ungodly hour before dawn, into the boon-docks, to Dnipropetrovsk, or Odessa, to the nonexistent pipeline “Odessa-Brody.” So in the end, it was Vadym, again, who set the timer on our little soiree; he was the one who had constructed the whole evening and controlled it, from start to finish, making sure nothing got loose—all guards posted, all buttons buttoned, ties knotted, and nothing, nothing, about it gave him the least bit of bother, except maybe his bladder that had to hold five hours worth of cognac, but that was the price he was perfectly willing to pay for his victory, hands down, over us. When Vlada called me the next morning, ostensibly to share impressions, or, as we called it, to debrief, it was already a new day, with new troubles and concerns, and if she had ever intended to tell me anything that would’ve been, in Vadym’s opinion, undesirable, the moment for it was gone, lost forever. Flushed, you could say, down a pipe…)

I’m coming, Aidy, just a second… I’m trying to wash my mascara off, got a clump in my eye.

(…because how could anyone ever imagine that a man can replace a woman’s best friend—that’s just silly, and it shouldn’t ever work that way anyhow. And yet every man, in his heart of hearts, holds the opposite conviction most dear: they all believe that as soon as we got one of them, we no longer need anyone else in the great wide world. But even when he’s such a sweetheart, and really wants to understand you because he truly loves you, and you love him too—really love him, not just bang him—even then, you can never hope to fall into that perfect and complete sync that exists between two women; and he will always begrudge you that, albeit just a little and in secret even from himself, and that is why love is always and inevitably war. Love is War, how Orwellian—and it is war, a special kind of war, one in which the winner loses it all… I’d rather be dead before I win one of those, that’s what I’d tell you now, Vadym, Vaddy—now you actually use that name yourself; I’ve heard you do that, now that there isn’t anyone else to call you by that name—after you’ve seen your victory dead, quite literally, in an oak coffin with brass handles, so why are you still beating on a dead horse, Vaddy?)

Just… a… moment! Can’t you wait another second? I can’t hear anything in here, stop talking—you and your habit of hollering across the apartment like it’s the open range or something!

(That’s another one I can’t seem to cure him of—I’ve pointed it out so many times and all for nothing… Aidy’s just like his old man: when we took the crew to interview him, he didn’t hesitate to bellow at us, myself and the cameraman, from another room—never mind that we were perfect strangers to him. Every man turns into his own father, so does that mean that I—what?—am I turning into my mother, too? Ugh, that would not be good….

Now Vlada, she never resembled her mother in the least bit; it was more like Nina Ustýmivna was a sort of an aging child for her, an adopted and really obnoxious child—Vlada rarely even left Katrusya with her, only when she had no other choice—but actually she managed her mother rather elegantly, unlike yours truly, she knew what buttons to push. Whenever Nina Ustýmivna took a deep breath to launch—with that heavy, theatrical sigh that instantly made my skin crawl all over—into her favorite oratory about what hard, sad, hopeless lots Vlada and I drew in this life—meaning the absence of certified-and-stamped husbands, because, of course, Nina Ustýmivna’s mantra, “a dead husband is better than no husband,” was her holy and regularly professed creed, and she never did really accept her daughter’s divorce, of which her daughter, smart girl that she was, informed her only after she had the paperwork in hand, saving herself from several valium-mediated dramas—no sooner could Nina Ustýmivna begin one of her “cello solos,” as Vlada called them, than Vlada would raise her eyebrows and respond, very solemnly, in the same grave cello tones, “What husbands, Mommy? Please, we can’t be bothered, nous sommes les artistes!”—and for some impenetrable reason, the French exerted on N.U. had the same effect as a crack of a whip on an old lesson horse. Her whole affect would change into a collected, grandiose kind of posture, monumental in a vaguely imperious—imperial—way, as if the woman suddenly remembered that she was “an artist’s wife” and must bear this time-honored designation with the utmost dignity. And the funniest thing was that N.U.’s real name, the one on her passport, was not Nina, but Ninél, an anagram of Lenin, not something one acquired with a high-bred childhood and French governesses—and really, it’s not like there were any governesses left in the USSR in the 1930s—but proof, quite to the contrary, of the wild and raucous youth of Vlada’s Komsomol–activist grandma and her Bolshevik-minted (one of twenty-five thousand) Ag teacher grandpa, who, as Vlada sarcastically pointed out, had to have run roughshod on plenty a kolkhoz-resistant “location” before they decamped for Kyiv in 1933; so, she added, we’re lucky it’s Ninél and not Stalína, Octyabrína, or some other Zvezdéts you’d never shake off.

I suspect that it was in Nina-Ninél Ustýmivna’s rigorous school of behavioral management that Vlada acquired her benevolent, gracious, ironically indulgent attitude toward the “professional wives”—that breed of belligerent females with the eyes of bored ewes who always lurk, like security guards, in close proximity to their husbands, aiming for a chance to grab, à la the unforgettable Raisa Gorbacheva, their own share of limelight when you are having a professional conversation with their husbands, all the while communicating to you with their every grimace and gesture exactly what a hopelessly inferior creature you are as you stand there all alone, with no man in sight whatsoever. I can’t help myself around them: If not for your VIP beefcake, I’d pack you off where the sun don’t shine, bitch!—but Vlada found them as entertaining as an exotic animal species, like the white rhinoceros, and she almost felt sorry for them somehow, just like for those poor rhinoceros that are so easy to spot and shoot in their bright white skins.)

Phone, sweetie! Can you get it? Here—it’s your cell…. Yes, you left it in the bathroom—and tossed a towel on top of it, too.

(What I really like is to listen to him talk on the phone—it’s just like watching him out the window, or in the street, in a crowd, when he doesn’t see me, smiling to myself on the sly. Once I eavesdropped on a parallel line for almost the entire conversation, listening to the two men’s voices like to a radio play—if the other voice had belonged to a woman I would’ve hung up of course, instantly and instinctively, otherwise it would’ve looked really bad, like I’m a jealous harpy or something, but with another man on the line it was really cool. I could listen, against the shadowy background of the other man’s low boo-boo-boo, for the eager sprout of his lithe, pleasant voice, growing like a beam of light, and for his laugh with that little snort, like a young horse, that always makes me want to stroke him… and it’s always fun to watch guys talk to each other when there is no woman around to constrain them or make them want to preen. Men’s conversation has a different rhythm: it’s faster, more aggressive; they throw lines like punches; they spar like schoolboys at recess; they don’t let their emotions crawl all over the place like we do—they keep them tight and focused inside their sentences, like fists, which, when you listen in, does sound like they’re jousting a little.

“I even went to Crimea once with that Kápytsya guy,” grumbled the base, a fellow physicist in his previous life, apparently. “Should’ve taken a woman instead,” retorted my mensch. “I would, but they all leave me in May,” the other explained, with a glee I thought unexpected. “Seasonal allergy!” diagnosed mine. “Yep, that’s what it is, and I can’t make it before July…”

I put the receiver down at that point, because they were making me laugh. Later, Adrian told me about the guy—they were in the same class at university, roomed together in the Lomonosov Street dorms in the late eighties, and the room was right across the communal kitchen where the Vietnamese students fried hot-cured herrings every day, so the boys knocked out their window to get some air, and then had to nail a padded quilt over it in winter. In his telling of it, this all sounded downright hilarious, like a well-pulled-off prank, and clearly that’s how they thought of it at the time. And now this buddy of his was out of work, his lab due to be shut down, separated from his wife, and out of luck with women in general—always had been, but I knew that much already.

He gives me full and very detailed reports about his friends, of whom there always seem to be more. I haven’t even made it through the whole list yet; it boggles the mind, really, how he managed to acquire so many. It’s like he hasn’t lost a single pal in his entire adult life—he’s still trailing people from all the way back in middle school—and somehow, incredibly, he manages to hold the whole mob in his mind, remembering all their domestic troubles, fights with parents, snafus at work, abortions, and divorces. Lets them all cry on his shoulder when they need to, listens to everyone, makes helpful phone calls, deals with funeral homes, hospitals, and car mechanics. I can’t even keep their names straight because once he’s introduced someone to me he refers to them as if they were our common friends and not someone only he knew, as in, “Igor called.”—“Which Igor is that, the one that’s losing his hair?” And every time I evince such considerable powers of retention it makes him go all sunny—“Yep, that one!”—and of course it never once occurs to him that the shedding Igor may not at all appreciate having me, or any other sexually relevant woman, privy to the embarrassing details of his personal plight. But men have always delivered their brethren to women they love without so much as a blink—bald heads, binges, erectile dysfunctions, and marital affairs included—the way a woman would never hand over her friends—her self-preservation instinct wouldn’t let her, unless, of course, she’s a complete idiot. That, and that fundamental feline neatness of hers, the one that demands she hide her blood-soiled pad where he’ll never see it, that she pluck those naughty hairs from her chin, that she smarten up and wash between her toes. Anything so unseemly honest you might betray to your man about your friend today might come back to haunt you tomorrow, as if you’ve unwittingly opened his eyes to aspects of female nature he, with his manly shortsightedness, never noticed before, had no inkling existed at all. And that’s why, generally, women’s solidarity is much stronger than men’s—women guard what unites them far more jealously.

Whatever I tell him about my friends has already passed a kind of censorship, whose partial objective, let us be honest, is to dim the ladies’ stardom a bit, turn them into a courtly entourage befitting my own queenly persona, into a kind of an organically coordinated flowerbed, a magnificent backdrop against which I can cut an all-the-more-compelling figure. Any details that might claim a disproportionate share of his attention are in this process corrected and retouched, while the most flattering light is turned upon Me the Magnificent.

But this is different from what men do; this is women’s business as usual, the game we’ve always played, ever willing to change parts to help each other out—your turn to be the queen today, mine—tomorrow: around Vadym, I was Vlada’s lady-in-waiting, just like she was mine when I was seeing Ch., for instance, or D. before him. So when you think about it, this is just another manifestation of our feminine solidarity; guys wouldn’t know where to start—they’re forever falling over each other to stomp one another out to impress you, like bucks or elephants or some other animal before a female, and without even a specific goal in mind, such as, for example, actually stealing you from the other guy, just for pure art’s sake…. Alright, sounds like he’s finished his conversation, and I think my eyes look almost normal again. You can’t tell I’ve been bawling… a little puffy, but I’ll tell him it’s because I had to rub the mascara off, with cold water, that’s it. Shit, I bet the food’s all gone cold in the kitchen by now!)

Vaddy—gosh darn it, I am so sorry—I meant Aidy, of course… can’t talk today. Who did you say called? Oh that one…. (He doesn’t see it; he sees nothing—neither puffy, rabbit-pink eyes, nor my anxiety over this Freudian slip—he just goes on shining like a new penny, because of what he’s just heard on the phone. He’s rushing to tell me, now, right away; he’s eager to share and, of course, to get the benefit of my encouragement and approval: our candelabra just got another buyer, can you believe that? Some hotshot, hot enough to desire his own independent appraisal; he’s got an expert too, flies him in from Moscow because he doesn’t trust our homegrown Ukrainian ones.) So does that mean you can have them bid against each other—your marmot and this new one—set up a little private auction of sorts? Is that how it works? Wow, that’s awesome, Aidy! Congrats!

(There are more details; he keeps piling them on with that same forthright, barnstorming tempo of male business talk, and it takes all I’ve got to scrape together enough attention to hang on, almost wrinkling my forehead in concentration in order to stay with him, but I feel such a heroic effort is beyond me. I am really tired. I can’t muster the grace my mind needs to leap from one thing to the next, one stone to the next across the stream, especially when I know what dangerous craggy rocks lie hidden under the surface, and how hard it is to lift them from the bottom. He doesn’t even notice. He’s just chirping on, a merry little bird, oblivious, like he isn’t the reason I’m suddenly able to see underwater with this bizarre second sight that catches glimpses of the terrifying depths we skim so innocently. He is just a guy dreaming his mind-twisting dreams; he unloads them on me and goes on with his day. He is always at ease when I’m around, within reach, but as soon as I make to leave the room, I hear his indignant Where are you going? behind me, as demanding as the howl of an unattended baby. Although, maybe, there’s a bit of a protective instinct in it too, and a touch of that anxiety that you always feel when you let a piece of yourself go into the unknown, like if you forget a document folder in an empty train compartment, or something like that. For as long as I’m out of reach he is prey to all kinds of fearful troubles, like the hordes of hungry-eyed men he thinks of, as he once confessed to me, every time he goes out without me—he notices them in the crowds, these pushy, predatory types with their teeth-baring leers, ready to sink their fangs into their pretty prey, and always shudders at how many of them prowl out there, and how I have to walk among them like Little Red Riding Hood in the woods.

And that’s why he is only truly content and happy when I am at his side. It’s even true when he sleeps: when we are in the same bed, he either doesn’t dream at all or get the same regular crap I do, just like everybody else, stuff not worth retelling, but when I’m gone, even if I get up and leave without waking him up, that’s when Adrian Vatamanyuk’s private screenings begin. Click—and a tape of unknown provenance slides into his unattended head; up until now these have featured totally unfamiliar characters in a period drama, but now, apparently, it’s my turn to star since the most recent installment has me interviewing Olena Dovganivna—and that’s just perfect, what can I say, a real séance. Like a hundred years ago, before people had TV, and various loons also set up interviews with the dead, spinning tables and all, “Spirit, spirit, are you here?” To which any self-respecting spirit naturally responds with “Fuck off,” or something along those lines, and rightly so, because really, leave the man, I mean the spirit, alone. You’ll all be there, in your own good time, and will certainly find out whatever it is you’re after.

I’m totally with the spirits on this, only our situation is a tiny bit different, a rather big bit, actually, if you really think about who started it and who doesn’t leave whom alone. I personally never bothered anyone, no spirits, no nothing. I’ve got enough trouble without them, and so does he, by the way—he’s running around with those antiques of his like a chicken with his head cut off. Thank God, he’s banking a bit of change here and there, but it’s not like I can’t see how much he misses his physics, all those alternative energy sources he can’t bring himself to part with, can’t quit on that dissertation of his even if no one else gives a flying hoot about it. He keeps futzing with it just so he can keep one foot in that door, not even a foot, a toe, a pinkie, even after his business started making enough to pay the bills—but still not enough, I don’t think, to move out of these boonies into a decent neighborhood, not to mention any murky plans regarding our future.

I don’t know really—one could, I suppose, get a loan to buy a place, but that takes connections at the bank. Maybe one of his clients could help—all our banks start their own collections these days. What about this new candelabra candidate who’s supposed to be such a hotshot, what if? Aidy may have had the same idea, that may be why he’s so wound up about it, why he’s so inspired to keep on about all the details of the deal he’ll make, while it takes all I’ve got just to keep staring at him, as if opening my eyes wider will help me hold on to at least the gist of what he’s saying.

And where, I ask you, do spirits fit in all of this? In what itty-bitty crack? It’s no wonder he just dumps them all off on me, shakes them off like a dog come in from the rain—watch out when they fly! It is my job, after all, nothing to be done about that, and the film about his great-aunt is also mine to make—no man would ever make that movie, wouldn’t even think of it. It’s like Yurko said—he’s our Bluebeard who, whenever he’s not embroiled in the many challenges of his domestic life, likes to show off his feminism like a rented Brioni suit—“Who’s that poor thing you’ve dug up? If you were going to mess with UIA, go find yourself a real ace, some daredevil who mowed down the bad guys like hay, first Germans, then ours, pardon me—Russians—and then roused a revolt somewhere in the Gulag. Now that would be something—and you picked some wallflower with a typewriter. What kind of story is that?”

Sure, I agree, not much there, but I’m not the one who did the picking you know—this, the story, picked me, knocked me down and had me, did, in fact, have me quite literally, which, of course, I shall never tell Adrian, and of all my friends could only maybe tell Vlada—she would appreciate it, but by the time this happened Vlada was no longer among the living, and now it’s all guys all around me, at work, at home, wherever I turn, that’s just the way the cookie crumbled, and I go around censoring myself to accommodate them.

So there you have it: I’m smiling and nodding at him, all dutiful, because I know he needs my encouragement, and support, and regular watering, weeding, and feeding. Every woman must cultivate her little garden with the proudly erect phallus at its center, like a Mexican cactus—these are very demanding crops, these phalli; they wither and die without constant care and attention, and if I need to call off my guards, let my hair down, and just be myself for a little while I have two options: soak myself into a pruney-fingered blob in a pine-scented bubble bath, or, more radically, perfume myself with vanilla all over, pounce on him, and drag him to bed growling like a panther to buy myself a relaxing half hour of complete abandon. Only, unfortunately, the second option is not really an option when I’m exhausted like now—the kind of exhausted that wears your nerves down hair-thin and makes you want to cry—and I would really be happiest right now if I could just sit with you, Aidy, without either of us saying anything. I’d sit and finish this Chianti you found—it’s really wonderful—pour more for myself, and you won’t even notice—the wine glows beautifully in the glass I hold against the candlelight, burns with a dark garnet fire. I know you can be quiet, Aidy.

You’re one of the few people with whom it’s been easy and natural from the start to be quiet—there was never anything foreign or alien in your presence. And that may be what I love most about you—a man with whom it is nice to be quiet, what a gem!—because there are things you really can’t talk about with men, and all these things settle in us, accumulate and calcify like scum inside pots or plaque on teeth, and itch and itch, and then begin to oppress us—vaguely, so we can’t even name them and don’t even know what’s wrong with us until one day we die and no one ever finds out what it was that gnawed on us as we lay on our deathbeds….)

Aidy? Aidy, listen to me.

No, I didn’t understand any of that, I’m sorry. Honestly? I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about something else entirely. Don’t be upset. You know what it was?

Here, cin cin, to us, and let everything be great. Let it all go smoothly, you know—with your deal, and generally… listen.

It’s your dream that made me think of this, the one you had earlier today—about me interviewing your great-aunt Gela at a table in the Passage. Actually, I brought you a tape to watch with an old interview of mine—take a look at it later, okay? It’s in my tote, in the hallway. You can turn the sound off, so it doesn’t distract you, the picture’s the thing—you’ll see what I mean when you watch it… Aidy, listen, I’m serious. Something’s going on here—both with my film and with these dreams of yours. They’re connected somehow. And the two of us are somehow involved in it all.

There’s another plot behind all this, a different story. I am sure of that, dead sure. Feel it in my gut. No one really knew her, this Gela Dovgan. Even while she was alive.

How do I explain this… promise not to laugh at me, okay? All that stuff we recorded with your dad, what he remembered his mom and Grandma Apollinaria telling him—it’s all very good, no doubt about it. I can use a lot of what’s on those three tapes we have of him talking: Gela’s childhood, the Gymnasium, her joining the Youth Assembly, the Ukrainian student community in Zurich, and then the whole family going to the gulag “for Geltsia,” and your dad’s own memories of Karaganda, when he was little—how they rode the train for a month—it’s all important; I’ll use it, and all the family photos are really cool too. I’m just thinking about going to the woods to shoot some footage of old bunkers that are still there, but that’s when I have the shooting script—I’ll read it live against the backdrop of the woods…. Nah, no worries, I won’t climb into any bunkers, nothing’ll cave in on me—would you quit being like my mom, talking to me like I’m five! Only all that doesn’t quite cut it, Aidy. It’s all wonderful, but it’s not it. Not quite. She wants something different from me.

What do you mean who? Gela, who else? Olena Dovganivna. Olena Ambroziivna Dovgan, may she rest in peace.

You don’t think I’m losing it, do you? Thanks, ’preciate it.

Please, don’t take it the wrong way—I am really grateful to your dad and to you, for coming with me—he would’ve been totally different with me if you weren’t there, wouldn’t have talked to me like that, relaxed like with family—but your dad had seen her once in his entire life, and he was mostly asleep in his cradle when she came to see them in the middle of the night that time…. You see, Aidy—only, please, don’t laugh, this is really serious. I mean it. Basically the entire time she was in the underground she was among men. Except maybe those radio operators’ courses in ’44, but that was still under the Germans, and from then on, until she died in ’47, it was all woods and bunkers for three years straight—without a female soul beside her. And I’m not even talking about their draconian conspiracy in which they didn’t even know each other by name, never mind sharing anything personal…. That she presumably confided to the family during that visit about some guy she’d secretly wed doesn’t change anything, Aidy. Does not, trust me. Whatever kind of guy he was.

She had something in her heart—and no one to tell. Something only a woman would have understood.

You said it. Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m thinking.

Yes, please, a bit more. Thank you.

I think it’s still tormenting her—whatever this thing is that she died with, not having told anyone. And she wants me to help her unburden herself.

She needs me. And you too, Aidy. That’s why we’re together. Well, of course it’s not the whole reason. I remember it perfectly—you were smitten at first sight by my legs in black jeans, a first-round knockdown, a kick in the gut, of course…. Only I am not kidding, Adrian Ambrozievich. I am as somber as a fresh-cut tombstone.

So about the tombstones.

I wonder if it is time we dig into exactly how she died. Under what circumstances. ’Cause it would be a crying shame to stick into the film that sorry claptrap of an MGB excuse you guys’ve been hanging on to since ’54; that’s one. And two—no one has really looked into it yet: after 1991, when you finally could, there wasn’t anyone left, was there? Grandma Apollinaria had passed already…. No, sweets, stop it. I’d never mean it like that—of course, there’s always something else; that’s life. It’s what always happens when there’s no immediate family left—the children, they care what actually happened to their parents, because it affects them directly, it ricochets into their lives, although even then, depends on the children…. And who’s she to you—Grandma’s sister, big deal, plenty of families don’t even remember kin like that. You should thank Granny Lina that she managed to pass it on at all! Oh absolutely, you don’t even have to mention it—of course Lina looked up to her since she was little; Gela was her icon, the older for the younger—sure thing. Gela’s brilliant, Gela’s beautiful, Gela joins the Plast, Gela joins the Youth Assembly, boys tail Gela in packs wherever she goes—that kind of stuff stays with you for the rest of your life; even if Gela had lived, and she became a hero and died heroically on top of all that…. Basically, you got lucky. No, not with her dying and all—with Granny Lina, she could’ve kept mum, you know. Secure a happy Communist childhood for her grandson. Many did, nothing wrong with that.

So, Aidy. We’ve no other choice; we need intel. Not from the family, but from the twilight zone. The other side of the moon. From the underground, yep. From her last years. That’s where we gotta dig.

We’ve got the lead, too. A tiny one, but enough to latch on—her death was recorded by the MGB; we know this from that ’54 epistle. I bet you anything a few folks earned themselves new stars for that operation. That’s where I want to start: where, when, under what circumstances did she die. Documented precisely. And then we’ll go from there. It’ll work.

This, naturally, won’t be easy. Nothing’s easy in this ghetto country of ours. But at least it’s not 1954, and our own Ukrainian Security Bureau does give up their archives bit by bit at the rate of their honorable retirees’ relocation to the Lukyaniv Cemetery, or wherever it is they bury them these days…. Yep, to avoid traumatizing anyone…. You can scoff all you want; I think they must be really vulnerable right now. If you’re gonna break women’s fingers in the doors or, you know, crush testicles with your boots, you’ve got to be, among other things, a hundred percent sure that you would never ever be held responsible for it, and by the time you’re old, after you’ve lived all your life with that certainty—heck, the idea alone’d give you a heart attack!

Okay, whatever, to hell with those—let their underworld colleagues take care of them, the ones with the pitchforks…. These archives, basically, have the same setup as the spetskhran storage in the good ol’ USSR, when you needed to read some pre-Brezhnev issue of Pravda “for work,” and you brought a note certifying that you were a PhD in history, and that was your topic, so this was something the government actually tasked you to do—go read Pravda from such-and-such year. (Wait, how do I know all this? Oh yeah, from Artem again.) Only here instead of Pravda, or some writings by Hrushevsky, or whoever, you’ve got the basic biographical data for the person you need: Dovgan Olena Ambroziivna, year of birth—1920, place of birth—Lemberg/Lwow/Lvov/Lviv, year of death—1947, place of death—and that’s where we appeal to you, our kind and valiant record keepers…. It’s like, you know, it’d be nice to find Grandma’s grave, do it all up neat and proper. I’ve heard they let the family have the case files without a fuss; Irka Mocherniuk’s mom made an inquiry about Irka’s gramps, what, five years ago maybe, and got to take it all home, with all the denunciations written about him bound neatly. Said she learned all kinds of interesting things about old family friends.

Because if I try to go there with an official letter from my channel—all doe-eyed and innocent, I’m just looking to make a movie here, I won’t be any trouble at all, can I just take one little peek in there, please?—they’re sure to go all hot under the collar and turn vigilant on me like they’ve been taught in their KGB school. They’ll sift through the case and cut out anything that could compromise their colleagues who are still alive, and all I’ll get instead of a fat binder will be a manila folder with two pieces of paper glued into it. You can bet your life on that. You, as a direct relative—her, you could say, descendant—have a much better chance.

So, whatddya say? Can we hold ’em up or what?

Aidy, Aidy… you’re my bunny rabbit… warm and fuzzy.

Nope, you don’t have to go anywhere—it should all be in their central archive, here in Kyiv, all the important UIA cases are here, I’ve asked. The files on the Supreme Command—those got shipped to Moscow, they took loads of Ukrainian archives, in 1991 most recently, after August 24, right after the independence—cleaned the stacks out like in ’41 before the German army, people say, burned papers right there in the yard for several weeks—covered their tracks, you know. Of course there are things we’ll never learn—but it doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. It’s not like they went anywhere; we’re still living with them. Only it’s like walking in the middle of the night through someone else’s place—you keep bumping into furniture.

Speaking of which—we should blow out these candles. Could you turn on the light, please—not the main one, just the pendant above the table?

Yeah, I am… really tired.

O-oh, fuzzy-duds… you’re so warm…

No, before we turn in, would you mind watching that interview of mine with Vlada? Yes, that’s the one I told you about—you didn’t see it air, did you? That was before our time. I didn’t have Diogenes’ Lantern then—my pieces ran as individual interviews with some editorial cuts. And here on tape it’s all raw footage, as it went. No, I’d rather not; I’ve seen it today already. I don’t want to do it again. Just don’t have it in me, Aidy. Honestly. Watch it alone, in the bedroom, okay? I’ll go ahead and accept my fate—do the dishes here.

That was a glorious dinner you fixed. Thank you, toots.

You’re so nice—what would I do without you?

Just leave it, leave it. I’ll take care of it.

Aidy, Aidy, did you play with girls when you were little?

No, I just wanted to ask if you remembered this game we used to have—dig a little hole, line it with flowers, tinsels, beads, make it like a picture, cover it with a piece of glass and bury again? A secret, it was called.

You don’t, do you?

Her name is Anastasia, and she’s my intern—I’ve got interns now, can you believe it? That’s how it all begins, isn’t it? And then one fine day you realize that everyone around you is younger than you are, and not just younger, but like a pack of teenage wolves—nipping at your heels waiting for you to make room for them. They are the first generation that won itself the new Europe—the one whose tender minds, their young and gelatinous brains, got steamrolled by the whole megaton bulk of American media. It’s just like in the old days with the poster of the glaring Red Army soldier pointing his finger at you: “Have you enlisted in the Army?” Only the questions are different now: “Have you vacationed in the Canaries?” “Have you bought a Mercedes?” “Are you shopping at Gucci?” And they fall over each other in their mad rush, wherever the gigantic finger on the screens sends them at the moment, snapping whatever seems like an obstacle in their way. I can just see the spike on the suicide graph that this Internet generation will deliver our sociologists in ten years or so—whoosh, like the Independence Square fountain.

This one’s decked out in a Gucci blouse, a pair of Bally boots, and a tote bag to match the boots. She’s a pointy-nosed little doll with eyes like a pair of plastic buttons and a permanently gaping mouth, already marked with a pair of lines emerging on each side, a bit soon for her very early twenties, but I bet that sensuous little mouth of hers has worked over more thick masculine stubs than I have in my entire life. Unless, of course, it’s Daddy who dresses her. Actually, the two are not mutually exclusive.

Whenever Gucci Nastya aims her moist gaping beak at me (at me!), I have to fight back a strong urge to inquire, with great concern, whether she, by chance, is suffering from severe sinusitis. Such is the new crop cultivated for the profession by the Journalism Institute right under our noses, here in the old Syrets’ neighborhood, in the snow-white sarcophagus the Communist Party built for its own spawn right before the ol’ USSR’s demise, because their old place on Rylski Street, also a not-too-shabby Secession villa with lions, which Gucci Nastya and I happen to be passing right now, was getting uncomfortably crowded for the Party’s lush cabbage patch.

The villa is now a bank and the lions have to sit encircled by pink granite, as if in the middle of a skating rink. I ask the future Ukrainian journalist if she knows what this building housed a mere fifteen years ago—not that distant a past, really, she must’ve been going to school already—if she knows that her alma mater is genetically related in the full sense of the phrase to the establishment that used to rule from here and, judging by the prostituting proclivities of national journalism, a place’s karma is indeed something that gets passed on like genes, only I don’t tell her that.

Anastasia (that’s how she introduces herself—by her full name) keeps me in the crosshairs of her plastic-button eyes and her blow-job-ready little maw—no, she doesn’t know what used to be here, and it is obvious that she doesn’t give a flying fuck either. But I am the one who will sign her TV-internship report, and later she’ll be telling everyone that she interned with Goshchynska herself, so, after a momentary hesitation, she dares to offer an obsequious giggle—meaning, that’s cool. Guppy. Goldfish in a bowl. Why, for God’s sake, journalism? Why not some business management, with the prospect of a job at a foreign firm where she could marry someone Swiss, or Dutch, or, worse comes to worst, American? Why’d she choose this?

“Nastya,” I say tenderly, “would you mind me asking why you decided to become a journalist?”

I can almost physically sense the balls my question sets in motion as they roll and clack inside her skull—she’s calculating which answer would score the most points. Like in a computer game. A small, agile, ferreting kind of a brain, tuned to promptly locate food.

“I’ve always been good at writing.”

See Business, Natalie, Elle Ukraine—the advice column: How to Succeed at a Job Interview. Be confident; try to convey the impression of a person who knows the value of her professional accomplishments. And, of course, the American TV shows—Melrose Place, Project Runway. And I have to put up with all this because she’s attached herself to me like a piece of chewing gum on the sole of my shoe, because I, when we left the studio together, was foolish enough to offer the child a ride downtown, and then the child climbed out of the studio car with me, and to my tactful “Where do you go from here?” twice already responded with “I’ll walk with you,” not blinking an eye. What was it that Russian said: my generation’s shit, but yours is something completely incomprehensible.

“Writing—meaning spelling?”

I’m not holding back anymore.

An actual emotion finally flashes through the plastic eyes—anger, a lurking predatory enmity, even her little lip instinctively pulls up into a snarl—only the growling is missing. Alright, we’ve got contact now. In another year, armed with her diploma, she’ll write in some toilet-paper-yellow tabloid that Goshchynska hates women. Especially young ones, beautiful ones. And intelligent ones, naturally. And, if on top of that the girl gets paid a couple grand a month, she’ll see no difference between herself and me whatsoever, except the fact that I am older and thus, in her understanding, of lesser quality, like yogurt past its use-by date.

The more I watch them—this savage new undergrowth—the less motivated I feel to have a child. And all the more relieved that I haven’t had one yet—you can’t keep them, protect them, from this. You can’t lock your flesh and blood in a room and feed them organic spiritual product through a little window in the door. I can’t imagine how the ones whose parents did manage to raise them like that navigate this jungle. Especially if, God forbid, their parents can’t quite shoulder Gucci and Bally.

“Journalism, Nastya, is not just good writing.”

Who gives a damn? Why am I saying this? To whom?

The important thing is that here, next to Bohdan Khmelnytsky monument, I really have to shake her off in a hurry; I am about to cross paths with Aidy, who should be just leaving the Security Bureau’s public office on Volodymyrska Street (the former townhouse of the Hrushevsky family, by the way, I think automatically—How’d I get on this “former” properties trip?), and least of all do I wish to have this future golden quill as a witness. Only I’ve run out of ideas of how to rid myself of her gracefully. What a stupid mess.

“Excuse me,” I say, and pull out my cell, pressing, underhand, Aidy’s button. He sounds busy, responds monosyllabically, something’s not going according to plan over there; and here I go, with my idiotic, utterly unnecessary questions about where it’s best for me to wait for him, complete bullshit, but I can’t very well just tell him that the single purpose of my call is to allow me, once I press the end button, to turn back on my intern (I do wonder which one of those bosses of mine saddled me with her?) and extend a polite yet decisive hand.

“Well, Nastya, it was a pleasure to take a stroll with you, but someone’s waiting for me.”

Without the cell—that helpful crutch—I’d never have disentangled myself with such dignity. That’s what cell phones are for—to mask our rapidly progressing helplessness vis-à-vis the real world when we find ourselves face to face with it. A kind of a safety net for interpersonal communication without which we can’t really make a single step anymore—have to hang on to it at all times. Like babies in playpens.

Rejected but indomitable Nastya struts off down Sofiivska, swinging her little tush, packaged into two discrete halves inside her pants. (I bet she’s already got early cellulite in there, physically all these kids are somehow incredibly rickety, the Chernobyl generation—maybe that’s where their wolf grip comes from: snatch off your share in a hurry, because in another ten years you won’t have anything to snatch with?)

I turn onto Volodymyrska, its first hundred yards cheerful along St. Sophia’s white monastery wall under old chestnuts, and the next hundred gloomy—a shadow cast diagonally from the opposite side of the street where the KGB’s, now the Ukrainian Security Bureau’s, gray facade rears up at the top of the block, splattered on the face of the hill like a monstrous toad that’s pulled itself upright to St. Sophia, squatting in the middle of the city’s historical center, in the heart of Grand Prince Yaroslav’s ancient city. And I could have told Nastya that as late as the 1930s a charming little church stood here, St. Irene, dating back to the thirteenth century, as radiant and feminine as St. Sophia, white-walled under a dark-green chaplet of its dome (I’ve seen pictures). But the monstrous toad with a jail in its gut squashed it, crushed it with its weight till its bones—its walls—literally cracked, and today the only trace that remains of the little church is the name of a side lane—that’s all we get, names; that’s all that’s left to us, like rings with precious gems pried out of the settings.

Only Nastya, of course, doesn’t give a damn about all that, and in any case her interests will always be aligned with whoever did the crushing and not with whomever got crushed, because the crushed, as she learned from her mommy, daddy, school, and television, are the losers, has-beens, and screw-ups, so I can take my little church and go hide in a dark, quiet corner. I don’t like walking on that side of Volodymyrska—and I’m not the only one. In the Soviet days it was always empty, vacuumed clean—people have loosened up since then, lost the bit and the rein, but I still don’t like walking there. I’ll have to, though.

And right there, on the crosswalk before Reitarska, my cell rings: Aidy.

“It’s not here,” he says, and I’m almost run over by an especially nervous Toyota that jerks off before I quite make it all the way to the sidewalk. (I stick my tongue out at the driver.) Their archives, turns out, are not here but across the street, on Zolotovoritska. And that’s where he is right now. And that’s where I am to go; he’ll tell me everything.

“They’re all going to lunch now; I just made it!”

I turn around—like the indomitable Nastya, like a tank; I dash between moving cars not waiting for the green light. Zolotovoritska is a street I like: cozy, quiet, one of the few streets in the center that retains its true old-Kyiv charm, and even the recently sprouted cohort of granite-plated bankomorphic high-rises can’t do anything to destroy its spirit. And right on the corner of this agreeable street, in front of a flowerbed, on a little knoll, in the sun, stands my good lad—like a beacon to show me the way—and it’s instant: a hot wave of utterly inane joy at the sight of his lanky-colt figure, his close-cropped head, his smile that beams from afar like a discrete source of light in the cityscape. He’s seen me!—but I did first! I did!—and while this distance between us—this bisector not found on any maps of the city, called forth for just this minute beside this flowerbed, this line that’s made this empty corner of Zolotovoritska and Reitarska alive, buzzing and pulsing for this one minute, shrinks at the speed of the intercepted glance (the knee-buckling, head-spinning kind that makes your heart drop into bottomless tenderness), while this “crosswalk,” invisible to all but the two of us (and no city in the world has road marks more important than these!)—counts down the seconds that remain between us—seven, six, five, four—I see, with peripheral vision (like a black gangster-mobile that pops up out of nowhere in a cheap action flick, and next a window’ll roll down to let out the muzzle of a submachine gun)—an incursion onto our bisector, from somewhere behind me on the sidewalk, of someone else’s black shadow. Not a casual brush but a frontal attack, resolutely aimed to wedge itself between the two of us, keeping us both in its sights. And when I step onto the sidewalk, a step away from Aidy, instead of touching him, finding him in a quick tangle of hands, shoulders, cheek, I run into the wall of that foreign look, sprung up suddenly beside us, short and hard, as if from under a frown. Prominent black eyes set in fleshy eyelids, an appraising look, but not in the usual men’s way, different, so that you want to shake it off right away, like a black spider; before this instinctive impulse can reach my brain, the look scrambles its aim by leaving only a vague unsettling residue, a slimy trail—and Aidy, taking his hand off my shoulder in an interrupted gesture, turns his head and smiles starchily in that direction as to someone he knows—barely, but enough that the person deserves a few niceties, even if he’d turned up at a bad time.

“Going to lunch?” the man asks.

This sounds like a send-up for a recently concluded conversation to which there is nothing to add, and it’s not hard to guess who this type, stuffed into his mass-produced suit like into a corset, might be—that very same archive’s employee who left the office on Aidy’s heels and should’ve kept going instead of coming to loiter around us. The mister’s head hovers at about Aidy’s shoulder, and the rest of him is not much to look at either—the rump significantly outweighs the top, legs sort of stubby—but his bearing and face are remarkable: a strong face, he must’ve been a real hottie when he was young; schoolgirls doodle such Mephistopheles profiles in their notebooks, only he’s not my type. I don’t like those Mediterranean-swarthy, sepia types with eyes that become more prominent and black the more white strands they get in their black wool, and something vaguely hawkish in their features—the whole aging Arab terrorist look. Or Israeli military. For some reason, I think they must be constantly sweating—like someone used too much oil paint on them and forgot to daub the painting. And he’s got military bearing alright; they all carry themselves like that—even when all they’ve got is an archive job. What’s his rank, I wonder?

Aidy cleverly makes a point of not introducing us. A cow would get it—go on, move right along, nothing to see here—but this forward-chested stub of a terrorist is much less perceptive than a cow; he’s about as sharp as my Nastya, and he proceeds to shower Aidy, verbosely, paternally, solicitously, with patronizing notes, with some utterly unnecessary details, belaboring the already belabored—that it’s better to telephone them, anytime after tomorrow, the more time they have for the search the better, not all cases have been cataloged yet, priority is given to requests for rehabilitation of which there don’t seem to be getting any fewer, not at all, quite the opposite, much has been done already, but there’s still at least as much to do. And there he stands, good and sturdy, with his thick, oily eyebrows and his hawkish profile, and bullshits and bullshits, and does not intend to shut up anytime soon, and I catch him glancing at me again and it finally dawns on me: he recognizes me! (Is that why he stopped?)

Shit, of all things, we could really do without this. Dude, why couldn’t you just go to lunch? Damn television—soon as you stick your nose out in public, someone’s always staring at you, liable to ask, “Is this really You?” And not even to get an autograph, but just because, to confirm they’re right. I keep mum like a real Ukrainian partisan, not a peep, standing beside them as if we’re on a subway and not in the middle of the street, and focus on breathing through my nose, keeping my face straight as a passport photo—it’s not actually your face people recognize as much as your expressions and, especially, individual intonation, so I stubbornly drag out my pause, long, endlessly long, folks’d be shuffling and coughing already if this were the theater. And he has no desire to wait forever either; it is his lunch break after all.

“I’m sorry; you’re Daryna Goshchynska, aren’t you?”

Here we go.

“And I’m sorry, who would you be?”

Aidy makes a grudging entrance—like a double base in a jazz band, “Pavlo Ivanovych, from the archive.”

Pavlo Ivanovych, sure. A purely KGB way of introducing oneself. I heard this from my mom: they were all either Pavlo Ivanovyches or Sergei Petrovyches, all those operatives, “guardians,” men without last names, just name and patronymic. For no reason I can grasp, this gesture of loyalty to the age-old traditions of his guild suddenly pisses me off—I mean really pisses me off. I go blind with a rage that’s rushed to my head—or maybe I’m just slow to react today and there is a whole cocktail of accumulated ingredients exploding now, all my aggregate irritation beginning with Gucci Nastya (or maybe it was Nastya who infected me); but at this particular moment, I am just as ready to bare my teeth and growl—so furious my jaws cramp.

“In that case, I am Daryna Anatoliivna!”

“That I knew,” he says, regarding me as if a fed condor atop a tall cliff: the heavy, wrinkled eyelids half shield his unmoving protuberant eyes—eyes fit for an Oriental beauty, velvet and languorous, a pair of jet stones. What are they doing on him? A prank of nature. With a very slight emphasis, just a skosh of pressure, exactly enough to make sure his words don’t go unnoticed, he repeats, “I know it’s Anatoliivna.”

Am I supposed to fuss, fawn, and flip right over? Gosh, wherever from, how, pray tell, I’m dying to find out? Piss off. Jackass.

“Your matinka still alive?”

That’s exactly what he says—matinka. In Russian, this would’ve been matushka—appropriate, even respectful. That’s how they used to talk among themselves—matushka, and also supruga, as in “Send my regards to your good supruga,” never “wife”—“wives” were something the people they interrogated had, men not to be considered or given regard. But for their own: matushka, supruga—the jargon of power, the victors’ argot. How did I not notice that he is translating from Russian in his head?

If he and I were iguanas, we’d be set in a perfect shot for Planet Earth on Discovery Channel: face to face, rearing with angrily unfurled hoods, waiting to see who strikes first. Or cobras—those also sway in the air before darting at the enemy, a lightning-fast whiplash. (I do also have Aidy on my side, calm like a boa constrictor, wise to keep his peace, and this, undoubtedly, gives me extra strength, but we’ll leave him outside the frame.)

“Yes, she’s well, thank you. And yours?”

Did I imagine this, or did the other iguana shudder, slump on its feet a bit?

“Please send my regards to her,” he goes on—not one to be knocked off his course, that’s another habit of the powerful—ignoring anything out of line, letting it slide as if it never happened. Canceled as being not in effect. Except, if your matinka’s off limits for me, then why the hell should you be messing with mine?

“Regards from whom?”

“Boozerov,” the iguana finally cracks and names himself, and it sounds unexpectedly intimate: the hood falls, the frill folds, there are worn loose sacks around his eyes, sagging jowls of well-cured skin above his shirt collar—a man in his fifties, and deeply so—with liver spots on his cheekbones, troubles with digestion and very likely his prostate, too, his career mostly played out, and obviously not too brilliantly, ahead of him only retirement with its pension and the constant worry that it’ll be cut, and what has he done to be snarled at like that?

“Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov,” he confides further—almost embarrassed as if he were whispering something lewd into my ear, a man pestering a woman in the street, following her—and is transformed right before my eyes, this poor, ill man, just think about living with a last name like that, sheesh, that’s quite a favor his mom and dad did him! A serious name—earnest, genuine Ryazan-Tambov vintage—the kind often found among old army retirees, like the unforgettable lieutenant colonel Plankin who taught PE and history at our school and was rumored to have become Plankin after he took his wife’s name, having himself been born Dillrodov. So Boozerov is actually not that bad, could be worse—unless, of course, Pavlo Ivanovych is pulling my leg, because he looks no more like an authentic Boozerov from Ryazan marshlands (Tatar cheekbones, gray eyes, a general watery indeterminacy of color) than I look like Osama bin Laden. The casting’s all wrong. Is he expecting to hear how pleased I am to meet him, or what?

“Just say it like that, to your dear matinka—Boozerov, Pavlo Ivanovych. I think she’ll remember me. Our paths crossed.”

“It’s a small world,” Aidy observes philosophically, inserting his head into the frame, and, thankfully, right on time—I have not the slightest clue what to say to Pavlo Ivanovych’s lyrical pronouncement. Really have no desire whatsoever to learn when and under what circumstances his path may have crossed with my matinka’s, and thus proceed to say nothing, obtusely and not politely at all. Over and out. And anyway Pavlo Ivanovych’s digestive juices must be trumpeting their call to battle: I see two yellowish-white streaks curdled like old sheep-cheese in the corners of his mouth and get genuinely queasy. Pavlo Ivanovych, on the other hand, feels quite the opposite.

“A pleasure,” he helpfully voices the line I missed—if no one’s serving, he’ll help himself. “A pleasure to know that she’s raised such a… famous daughter (last word spoken with the Russian stress). I myself often watch your shows, although it’s not always easy for me to find the time. And my daughter (with the Russian stress) just worships you.”

This stiff little stump in his corset suit smiles for the first time. What a surprise—an awkward, meager smile, à la Shtirlitz from the classic Soviet TV series. It looks as though he had to engage untrained and long-calcified facial muscles; maybe that’s what they did in their Cheka schools: set everyone’s faces to the same standard, one mold for all, but still—at the mention of his daughter, the smile works, comes out warm, likeable, brightens his face—he’s basically a handsome man, even exotic-looking, so what if his shape let him down a bit.

And I do smile back and say thank you, and that it’s very nice to hear: an automatic reaction like a camera’s flash once you pushed the button, but wait, it’s not over yet; he reaches into his chest pocket (No gun under his arm!—then again, should there have been?) and pulls out a notepad and shoves it at me, opened to a blank page of checkered graph paper. His daughter (with the Russian stress!) would be so thrilled to have my autograph. A loving dad—how nice. I’d be happy to, of course, only I would need a pen, too. And something for her personally, he mutters. Just a few words, one line. Of course, my pleasure. What’s her name? Jeez. Very nice… thank you… me too.

Sheesh, that was it?! All this sending of mysterious regards to my matinka (but I’ll make sure to ask Mom what his deal is, if, of course, she remembers him), all this drawn-out hanging on, and five minutes of utter bullshit—all just to get an autograph that’s given to anyone free, just for the asking?

Either I’m missing something or this customer’s really a little off his rocker. Not an iguana, maybe, but a different form of life for sure—the kind you have to study purposefully or you’ll never figure out what’s going on in its head.

“Call,” he says, by way of parting, putting his precious notebook back inside the pocket of his frock, “if you need anything.”

As if it were I who’d been the petitioner, and it is now I who’ll be extended the privilege, as one of “their” people—of the private, backdoor access, far from the hassle of the public entrance, whenever I call, as is only right and proper among “our” people. It’s like he doesn’t even see Aidy anymore, doesn’t look once in his direction—as if Aidy hadn’t been here, and his name’s not on the list, and his relatives don’t merit to be sent any regards (like, for example, Dovgan Olena Ambroziivna, year of birth—1920, year of death—1947, place of death—unknown).

“Your friend…” (a blitz pause, a double take, a quick stab of eyes: How much of a “friend” is Aidy to me really?) “has my office number. Call anytime.”

I just didn’t know any better and like an idiot sent Aidy down the straight and narrow honest path, through the turnstiles and security checks up front—could’ve saved us all a world of trouble just by using my national name, and not for official business at all, imagine that! Who’d have thought that Diogenes’ Lantern would turn out to be Security Bureau employees’ favorite show? Or, rather, the favorite show of Veronika Boozerova (poor kid, she must’ve gone through hell in school with a name like that!)—a Conservatory student and a future musicologist. Wow. I gotta admit sometimes it is useful to work in television; it has its perks, not just irks.

Nonetheless, we shall do just fine without any handshaking (judging by his momentary hesitation, the idea did occur to Pavlo Ivanovych). His hands, surprisingly, are not plump and stubby-fingered, but quite cultured, intelligentsia hands, but still—they must sweat. And no matter how stiff and upright he stands, his body is plain unmanly—everything sort of slipping down into the hips, pear-like. Can’t find a suit coat that could hide his butt—it is too well padded, and sticks out. A woman’s butt. I must be having an expressive-butt day.

Finally, we’re alone. A few more steps toward the Golden Gates (without speaking, we both head for the café next to the fountain)—and Aidy hooks his arm around my neck and lets it ride there, heavy like a small hungry animal with a mind to dart, nip below, and just as instinctively, I hug his torso, fall into step with him, let my side gnaw into his, and feel his warmth: the law of communicating vessels, as he says. And if Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov is compelled by the incorrigible habits of his trade to watch us from around the corner (or whatever it was Shtirlitz always did), that’s his own problem. Let him go choke on his chops.

“He, when he saw you, couldn’t get his pants down fast enough!” Aidy laughs. “You should’ve heard him in his office, before he signed my request: Who are you, and where from, and what for, and who’s she to you, and where did you get this information—a proper interrogation. By the end of it I began to seem suspicious to myself… and then—what a change!”

“Behold the power of a father’s love.”

“And Lolly’s popularity, let’s not forget that!”

“Yeah, especially among the SB types. By the time I go on air, he’s out like a log, I promise you—I’ve no doubt he goes to bed right after the news. A fan—please!”

“All the same, Lolly… you’re a TV star, a celebrity, and that pulls some weight—you can’t deny it. He must’ve had to make up that whole send regards to Olga Fedorivna thing right on the fly, just to rub elbows with you.”

“You think?”

“Bet my life on it. Anything to show that he’s not some pencil pusher, a no-name mutt. You’ll see; call your mom—I bet Olga Fedorivna will be very surprised.”

“Boozerov—how would you like that for a last name?”

“I almost lost it when he introduced himself. Took all I had not to crack.”

“What’d he say back in the archive? Just stick to his Pavlo Ivanovych?”

“I’m telling you, he was too good to look at me back there. As friendly as a rhino in heat.”

“But at least he signed your inquiry, didn’t he?”

“He signed it alright, said they’ll look, but they give no guarantee whatsoever that they’ll find anything. There’s only hope for those who enter here… something like that. At least now he’ll get his ass out of his chair.”

“God, and Veronika Boozerova—who names their child like that! And what, I wonder, do they call her at home—Vera? Nika? Rona?”

“Nika probably. Rona—that’s too high culture.”

“Well, he’s not a cop, after all—he’s, like, intelligence service, no? Daughter a Conservatory student… and did you see, he’s got quite decent hands?”

“I’ve met cultured cops, too. Once…”

Aidy launches into a long and funny story—the story itself may not be all that funny, but the way he tells them, all his stories, is very funny, or, rather, he knows how to infect you with the sense of fun he has with whatever he’s talking about. He’s got the power of suggestion, the gift of puppies and small children, reserved only for the truly talented among the adults, people of beautiful and pure soul. And I am laughing my head off listening to how the charitable Aidy and his friends taught a cop to play bridge on a computer when said cop showed up in the middle of the night in response to a call from their highly obnoxious neighbor, while they were having a rocking good time, and what came of that. His stories are often raw, bratty, full of street-smart gallows humor that’s irreverent, irresistible, and always draws you in, with its youthful excess of vitality but more with its organic innocence, its unfamiliarity with the darker sides of life, or maybe, the carefree disregard for them that borders on courage and most often turns out to be precisely that.

Somehow, incredibly, Aidy retains this purely boyish, friendly openness toward everyone he meets—as if the only things he ever expected from them were new and exciting adventures. People usually sense this, and the waitress who comes to our table to take the order, a blonde as pale as a flour weevil, also falls under his spell and begins to radiate friendliness, even throws in something in Ukrainian although the language doesn’t come smoothly from her lips. It’s always like that with Aidy, everywhere we go; I noticed this when things were just starting with the two of us, back when we were still on formal terms, and everywhere—in a line at the post office, in a taxi, at a video-rental kiosk—we goofed around and hollered and laughed out loud, and I saw the way everyone reacted, the loosened-up smiles that would spark around us, as if everyone remembered something nice, private, something long sunk in their memory; and that’s when I first realized that I wasn’t just imagining what was going on between us, that others could see it too.

The fountain splashes, drops of water fly out and land on us, the sun crawls out, adding color to the world, and the people around the other tables become somehow instantly more glamorous. Aidy finishes his story about the cultured cop, then reaches out and carefully extracts a miniscule shriveled leaf out of my hair. The weevil brings our beers, places the mugs on the dark-green rounds labeled Obolon, and timidly offers, “Nice and sunny, ain’t it?”

We unanimously decide to consider Adrian Vatamanyuk’s first raid on the SB archives a success and its unplanned finale especially remarkable. Spontaneity, Aidy declares with feeling, that’s what one needs to appreciate more in life—a deflection of an electron that determines the fate of a universe. The deflected electron—is that supposed to be Pavlo Ivanovych? The comical Pavlo Ivanovych, the middle-aged squid drilled into military shape, with the eagle’s profile, eyes of a harem prima donna, and the name of a hereditary Ryazan boozer, a twelfth-generation wino.

“You know,” Aidy says, “I can’t shake off the feeling that I’ve seen him somewhere before. Something about his face looks familiar…”

“With a face like that—you couldn’t forget the man if you wanted to!”

“It’s really something, isn’t it? Extraordinary. The eyes especially.”

“Do you think that’s why they stuck him in the archives? Couldn’t be an operative with a mug like that—they were all supposed to be plain nobodies… unrecognizable.”

May Pavlo Ivanovych hiccup gently over his lunch.

A pigeon lands, shakes himself, businesslike, and scampers between the tables looking for something to eat. Must be local, this is his spot. Them pigeons, they must have the place divvied up like the mob—who gets the park, the square, the café. You could make a separate map—the pigeon Kyiv—with flight trajectories, high points where a decent pigeon can take five, and, of course, the places where they can always find some grub. Plus the warning signs: cars, cats—you see so many dead pigeons in the streets, so lazy they can’t even bother to lift their butts from under the wheels.

“Still,” Aidy says, shaking his head stubbornly as if trying to chase off a fly that’s buzzing inside, “I’ve seen him somewhere before, I swear.”

“You’re just like Mykolaichuk’s Vasyl in The Lost Letter: ‘Listen, dude, where’d I see you before?’”

All of a sudden Aidy slaps himself on the forehead, and his eyes light up with mischievous little sparks.

“And what did we forget, huh?”

“What?”

“Des-sert!” He makes horrified eyes. “We forgot about dessert!” And, twisting, he waves at the waitress. “What’s on the tray today?”

The phone rings. (Not a bad opening for a script, Daryna thinks, half-asleep, anchorwoman at a still-independent TV channel—wait, nope, no longer independent, two days already not “in-”—and here a hot twist, a turn of the corkscrew in the pit of her stomach wakes her up completely. The previous day’s conversation with her boss rises in her mind. She didn’t dream it—but her train of thought keeps rolling, automatically, on its no-longer-necessary filmmaking track, not a bad opening for a script: it’s dark on screen, and in this darkness, the phone is ringing, an antique, prewar sound, tiling-tiling-tiling, like Alpine cowbells—you’re the cow, stupid, what antique sound? Those are the bells from the Milka commercial. Shit, brain’s stuffed so full of rubbish she can’t dig up what she’s really thinking from under all that. And why, in the name of grace, would anyone rouse a person at this ungodly hour—crap, it’s not early at all, ten o’clock already!)

The phone is ringing, and she slowly forces her foggy head to face it with a sense of deep hatred for the whole world—whatever that world may have contrived for her during the night, she does not expect it to be anything good: it hurts everywhere her thoughts turn. Like she’s been beaten. Well, isn’t that what they did? Stripped and pummeled her like a no-good, truck-stop whore and tossed the body under the trees in the windbreak. Only there isn’t a dog out there who’d call the police if he saw it.

The number comes up: it’s Mom. Oh no. Please, not this, not now. With Mom it’s even worse than with strangers: she has to parade in full splendor of your success the same as for everyone else, but somehow feel vulnerable as a cornered rabbit the whole time. And it doesn’t get more vulnerable than this, now.

Nonetheless, she picks up obediently and presses the answer button: filial duty, nothing to be done about it. Hasn’t called her mother for three days—pay up.

“Hi, Ma.” (God, just listen her voice—she sounds like a crow!) “How are you?”

This question always elicits the same response: her mother starts talking about her husband’s complaints—Uncle Volodya is slowing down, little by little. He’s got arthritis, can’t really bend his knee anymore; he’ll need surgery; his sugar is elevated, needs another round of IVs—aging has recently become an all-consuming topic for the elder Goshchynska, and the younger treats it with the sympathy of a devoted sports fan, albeit one currently following a different league. It is really not unlike a match—only drawn out in time, with its own rules, which no one explains ahead of time, and, unfortunately, with a predetermined outcome: you’re being shoved, at first with small, and then increasingly more debilitating blows, off the highway and into that same windbreak. Your withering body, as it prepares to become earth, rehearses its decomposition through a collection of infirmities, sore spots, and affected organs; breathing and moving become tasks that demand undivided attention; the morning evacuation is an event that sets the tone for the rest of the day; and all this makes the participants of the process members of a closed club, with its own champions and underdogs. And Uncle Volodya, by design, should’ve belonged among the former, should’ve proven a professional of aging—what else did he spend his life training for digging around in people’s innards, in the gaping flesh of rotten and damaged meaty fruits, where there should be no surprises left for him?

But it didn’t work out like that: Uncle Volodya whines like a child, resenting the slightest physical discomfort; the disloyalty of his own body, which is turning into an enemy minefield—one wrong step and you’re in the ditch—is experienced by him as a personal affront, an injustice that he, of all people, most certainly does not deserve, and in which his wife appears to be somehow complicit. He hasn’t given up enough to trust that she is on his side; he still believes he can go it alone; he is still kicking, creaking along, the old stump.

What Daryna fears and expects, with subconscious dread, to hear every time her mother calls is the news that Uncle Volodya hustled up an affair with some young nurse or assistant, his last mad love—with the packing of suitcases and, God forbid, division of property, and her mother’s tumble into the prospect of lonely old age. These things happen more often than you think; every fading man’s battle with his own body unfolds according to the same unchanging plan, and the appearance of a woman thirty or forty years his junior in it is as inevitable as menopause is for women. And when this stage of events is late in coming, you begin to worry, against your better nature—come on, already, you bastard, go ahead and do it, and get it over with! But the bastard seems to be taking his sweet time, and for today, it appears, red alert shall also be postponed. At least that’s one piece of good news in the last twenty-four hours (if one considers no news to be good news).

Mom is babbling cheerfully as usual, rattling off drugs she’s planning to buy, and also, it seems, something’s grieving their cat (a varmit that entertains himself by leaping onto guests from the top of a wardrobe or lurching from under a couch and sinking his teeth into your leg, but Mom and Uncle Volodya fawn over him like proud parents over their firstborn). “Go have him fixed already,” Daryna drones flatly as if uttering someone else’s lines, as she always does—a certain set of phrases is repeated in every conversation with her mother as if on a recording. (Or does this also belong to the rules of aging—same words, same things, same scratchy records: avoid all changes in the environment because the ones going on inside your body are enough to drive you nuts alone?) “Cut ’im and live in peace.” Who does she have in mind when she says that: the cat, or Uncle Volodya? Or, perchance, R. and their sordid story, as a delayed reaction to what she’d heard from her boss yesterday?

The mere memory of it is like a burn in her brain—she almost moans out loud again, you bitches!—but stops herself. She’s got it under control already; she’s awake, good morning, Ukraine. Lord, she used to be so proud to say those words on air. The last thing she needs now is to start bawling, so Daryna, teeth clenched, breathes hard through her nose, short and quick, in-out, in-out—until the stifling wave ebbs, retreats, and her eyes blink off a pair of tears that tickle her cheeks as they run down her skin. Olga Fedorivna, meanwhile, says she can’t do it—feels sorry for the living thing, meaning Barsik, the cat, what’s he done to be crippled like that?

But she must be sensing something uncertain on the other end of the line—or maybe she’s unnerved by the pause that’s stretching too long. The boundary of acceptance—the line of demarcation plowed between mother and daughter once and forever a long time ago, the flagged strip of no-man’s-land along which they stroll, each on her side, smiling to one another from afar like border guards of friendly nations—is not something Olga Fedorivna has ever dared cross. Generally, she is not a woman who crosses lines, clinging instinctively to every chilling interaction protocol instead, as if she feared that left to her own devices she’d melt into a little puddle on the floor. Like a snowman brought indoors.

Once when she was little, Daryna did bring one of those in—a small, doll-sized, and very dapper (as it seemed to her) snowman she made herself—and wanted to show off to her mom, and what stayed in her memory—the next frame stamped into her mind—was her mom wiping away the puddle on the kitchen floor, wringing out the rag into the sink and crying. That was the first time she’d seen her mom cry, and she didn’t grasp right away what was happening—at first it looked like she was laughing, only somehow not her usual way. What happened there, in the interval between those two frames—why was she crying?

Mom—Retired Snow Maiden. The long-established script dictates that it is she, the daughter, who must supply prompts in their conversation—lines like ready-made molds that the mother eagerly fills, scooping up snow with both hands. And this pause that is now spreading in the receiver like the puddle on the floor (Daryna even remembers the floor: plank, painted brown with oil paint, with pale crescents of scratches where a table had been moved), while the daughter hurries to swallow her tears and mentally wring herself out into an invisible sink, regaining her ability to pretend, this pause is like a flood, rising quickly, quickly, ever quicker under the neutral strip they’d constructed between them. Another moment and the whole pile will shift, slip, and slide, and the daughter won’t be able to babble that everything’s fine (couldn’t be crappier, really—meaning, it could, of course, but someone’d be calling an ambulance then). It’s just that she was still asleep, and she hasn’t called because she’s been busy, tons of work, barely keeping her head above the water. (No worries, she’ll soon be unemployed and free as a bird—actually, what is she going to do then? Hang out online for twelve hours a day? Have Mom teach her all her recipes and wait, dinner on the table, for Aidy to come home? Aidy told her not to worry, that he could support them both—said it with a proud note in his voice even, or at least that’s what she heard, and she got upset, because she saw the typical male egotism in it: Couldn’t find another time to boast your financial potency? Boasting probably couldn’t have been further from his mind; it’s just she, oozing her wounded suspiciousness of everything and everyone, like toothpaste squeezed from a tube—the defining characteristic of all the defenseless and humiliated. How quickly she takes on this role!)

All of a sudden, Daryna becomes truly scared: she sees herself in the emptiness of a moonlit landscape, in the zone of absolute loneliness, like Uncle Volodya with his arthritis—your misfortune isolates you, and afterward you have to learn to live anew, and with the people closest to you as well. How will she manage that?

In 1987, during Daryna’s pre-graduation field studies, she was suddenly summoned into the chancellor’s office, and from there taken to the First Department where a shortish KGB captain with shifty black eyes (swoosh—the red ID fold-up card opened under your nose; slap—closed, no time to see a damn thing, except maybe the captain) prattled about who-knows-what for two hours straight, like wind blowing sand at her from all sides at once, and then offered her an opportunity to “cooperate.” By that time she was so worn out by her futile attempts to pin down the direction of their schizophrenic conversation—no sooner did she feel she’d almost grasp it than it slipped through her fingers again—which jumped from vague mentions of her departed father, who, it was never quite clear, was either “not guilty of anything before our government” and all but paved the way for perestroika, or somehow posthumously obliged her, Daryna, to correct his mistakes (Which ones would those be exactly?), to heavily loaded, ratty hints about her classmates, the friends with whom she hung out at Yama Café on Khreshchatyk, and then abruptly to a completely fantastical “underground organization” that the captain’s institution, ostensibly, had uncovered at the university. The captain himself didn’t even pretend that he believed any of what he was saying; it seemed his only goal was to determine how much and what kind of hogwash he could dump on her.

In the whole two hours, she never once managed to catch his eye, as though the little black orbs moved by their own logic, different from that of regular people—the way, they say, you shouldn’t look shepherds in the eye because the dogs take it as a challenge and might just lunge for your throat. All in all, it was like having a conversation with a lunatic, when you don’t dare call the nurses because you know the head doctor is mad himself—and as she fought through the quicksand of shaken reality, half-hints, and half-lies into which she sank deeper the more she tried to clear them up, she thought, with sickening horror, that this was exactly how they once talked to her father before handing him off to their mad nurses. And the fact that times had since changed (Did they really?), that it was spring of ’87 outside the window and anti-communist protests whirled across the city, did not mean anything in this distorted world; and even if it did, then only inasmuch as it supplied this other side of the looking glass with new material for new schizophrenic distortions.

All of it wore her down so much that when the captain finally concluded his soliloquy (because he’d talked almost nonstop the entire time) and suggested she write some monthly reports for him, she, instead of telling him to eff off right there and then, agreed to “think about it”—compelled either by the student habit of not turning things in until the last possible moment (to win time to prepare, time to dress her refusal into an impeccably worded formula, although that was something they most certainly wouldn’t give a damn about!) or by the instinctive impulse to step away from the scene of an accident first, like when you break a heel walking, and only then catch your breath and assess the situation.

That it was a mistake, she realized right away, by how obviously and instantly happy it made the captain—but the gravity of it took time to fully manifest itself, specifically the three days that would pass before their second, and final, interview. She realized she never got out, never stepped away from that terrible office—quite the opposite: it was as if she’d chosen to take on its burden, hefted it onto her own shoulders, the silly little caryatid, and schlepped it around the whole three days, more or less delirious—having the conversation with the mad nurses inside her head the whole time. And what if… no, like this… and I’ll say to him… and he’ll… (and the shortness of breath the whole time).

Later she would recognize this infestation of mind in dissidents’ memoirs: people lived like that for years, wired, as if into an electric grid, trying to untangle something that by definition could not be untangled—drawn into a chess match with a schizoid. But at the time it felt like she was the only one left in the world. Her husband, Sergiy, couldn’t tell her anything helpful except recalling that his mother had also been approached by the KGB with something like this once, but who hadn’t been approached? Millions of people went through the same trials, and yet no collective experience emerged from it, and every rookie had to start from scratch as though he (or she) were the only one in the world—a metaphysical state, almost, like in love or in death when no other person’s experience is of any use to you, and no book has words for what is happening to you, the One and Only, with the sole difference that this whole thing was sealed under the massive lid of solid, shamed silence—this was not an experience people liked to share.

Sergiy was left outside, behind the looking glass, and his inept efforts to cheer her up resembled the unnaturally lively gesticulations of people seeing someone off on a train, before it departs: those outside wave, come close to the windows, tap on the glass, make faces—and those inside are already thinking about which of their suitcases has their slippers and toothbrush in it. When the train pulls out, both sides breathe a sigh of relief.

In a few more years, she and Sergiy pulled away from their shared platform never to return, but it was during those three days that she got on the train: the experience she lived through in isolation only added to her loneliness and put more distance between her and those she had considered to be her closest people—and about this the books also said nothing.

She’s always told both herself and her friends that she learned not to trust collective experience then, none whatsoever, because it was all slop and bullshit meant to befuddle the working class, and the only thing one could rely on was individual people’s stories. She used her example with the captain so often—in smoking rooms at work, at populous parties (appreciating, with a secret satisfaction, the instantly soured mugs of ex-informants—although why necessarily “ex-”?: good help is always in demand)—that she wore it to the bone. Apparently, there was another thing she learned from that experience: when someone humiliates you, you must return the blow instantly and with force—it’s the only way to stay on your feet. Any hesitation, moping, or attempts to explain what a good girl you really are automatically turn you into your enemies’ accomplice, before you’ve even had a chance to catch your breath.

No, she could find no faults with her performance in yesterday’s conversation; she did everything right. Daryna turns onto her stomach and presses the receiver against her ear—like a gun to her head.

“Mom.”

The puddle standing still on the plank floor, the wet glare of the kitchen light like the eye of a giant fish. It was a neat snowman.

“Mom, I’m quitting my job.”

A quiet rustle of fright rises in the receiver, the sound of air leaving a punctured tire. Daryna begins to comprehend, as if for the first time and with utmost clarity, that her mother has lived her entire life in anticipation of bad news. That for Olga Fedorivna good news has always been a mere interlude, a postponement. When on September 11 the Twin Towers in New York collapsed on the TV screen, Olga Fedorivna was certain that the Third World War had begun—the one she’d expected forty years earlier, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And she wasn’t the only one: Ninél Ustýmivna was so sure that standoff fifty years ago was going to be it that she had an abortion (Because who has a child when war’s about to break out?), so Vlada actually wasn’t her first. The generation of being ready for the worst.

What if they hadn’t been all that wrong, after all? What if that’s how you should live—always prepared to see the little world you painstakingly erected like a tiny industrious ant disintegrate before your eyes, ready to start from scratch again, just as painstakingly—pebble by pebble, twig by twig, scrap by scrap?

“That’s what I figured,” rumbles Olga Fedorivna, already dragging the first twig to her construction site, “that something was wrong, because the whole morning’s been so gloomy, so queasy somehow, everything just falling out of my hands!”

This touches Daryna, surprising her—“queasy” is an amazingly apt word. She does feel foul inside, poisoned.

“So what happened, why, how?”

“What’s been long time coming already. We’ve held out long enough anyway. They sold us, Ma.”

“How?”

“The usual way, like everyone else, packed us up and sold us. The whole village, our entire channel. With all its indentured souls, including my own. We’ve run free long enough—time to come in.”

Olga Fedorivna, a consumer of finished televised product, only allowed to peek into the production kitchen every now and then when her daughter cracks the door open, wonders naïvely to whom they’d been sold, and whether it might be possible to arrange with the new owners for Diogenes’ Lantern to remain on air. “You might as well take a lantern if you’re looking for shows like that on TV. Soon there’ll be nothing to watch at all—if it’s not soap operas, it’s those stupid talk shows everywhere; honestly, how stupid do you have to be to watch those? One feels sorry for the hosts; and the rest—click all the channels you want—are elections, elections, elections. Let them all get elected to hell already!”

Daryna can’t help but be amused by such fervent support and catches herself mentally calling, her boss, or rather, her ex-boss, as her witness: here you go, feedback from a common senior citizen! (And how long is it going to take, exactly—for her to leave yesterday’s office, to shake off the sticky coontails of their conversation?) And where, in the name of God’s grace, do they all—especially those who’d gotten to big money—get their unshakeable certainty that the audience is a herd of sheep that need only have the most insipid laboratory-protein chaff poured into its trough?

Ratings, their boss used to say piously (in the old days, back when they were a team, when they stayed up into the wee hours, high on instant coffee and their own arguments—Lord, did it all really happen; it wasn’t a dream?), ratings are the objective indicator of what people want, and there you have it: entertainment, and more entertainment, and of the kind that doesn’t overload the circuits upstairs. Malarkey! she’d fire back (that’s when her opinion was still worth something, when it could, she thought, change something); people consume whatever they’re being fed, simply because they don’t have another choice. The same way you go to Big Pocket and buy those plastic-looking apples fit to hang on Christmas trees—they don’t rot, don’t dry up, and they’d still shine a year later—but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t like a living, breathing, fresh-off-the-tree Simirenko, nice and juicy and with a real little worm inside, just that you wouldn’t find any in the supermarkets, only the tin Granny Smiths—eat all you want—and there you have your rating.

Their arguments ended—a long time ago. What happened yesterday was just a line drawn under the emptiness, dead air that’s been running for who knows how long, rustling with the blank frames of the played-out film. No more movies for you. She, Daryna Goshchynska, has been discarded as, by the way, many before her. Decommissioned, my dear, decommissioned, your place can always be filled with fresh meat, more agreeable and always willing to please—with a moistly open little maw and ecstatic whimpering when it’s being had through every hole.

Olga Fedorivna, meanwhile, is busy spinning her own thread of thought—mother and daughter run their parallel courses like two rivers divided by the hilly terrain of incommensurate experience, making inept swerves toward confluence and missing each other time and again.

“You’ve been sort of edgy for a while, Daryna. I even wondered if maybe things weren’t working with you and Adrian; I’ve been worried about you. I could see you were all nerves….”

Of course, if it’s “all nerves,” then it must be men troubles. Mom’s logic is ironclad. But the funniest thing, Daryna thinks, is that they both guessed wrong. She, for one, has been blaming all her tension of the last year on the film about Dovganivna, like an ostrich with her head in the sand—nose and ears plugged to avoid paying any attention to the stupendous shitstorm that raged around her, muck first pooling around her ankles and then rising to her knees, making it harder and harder to move, never mind breathe: live debates were disappearing from prime time; news people complained about receiving daily thematic instructions from their channels’ owners, prescribing exactly how they were to present each piece of news and about which they were to keep mute as fishes. Original programming sank under the tidal surge of Russian imports, as if life were being replaced by slipshod alien simulacra slapped together on a desktop by a sophomoric nerd—the dusk of reason falling all around. But she thought she had found a niche where “it don’t flood,” as Yurko liked to say; they all thought so, everyone who stayed with the channel to the end, stubbornly refusing to notice that it does, in fact, flood. Until, that is, it flooded absolutely everything in sight, and it became clear that there were no more niches—only those who pay and those who deliver the goods. Meaning, that’s how those who were paying saw things, and to them it looked like the natural order of things. The unnatural part was that there appeared to be no one who would object to that view.

“That’s what they offered me, Mommy, one of those imbecile talk shows.”

“Instead of your Lantern!?”

“If you can imagine that. A show for young people. The producer said ‘we’re revitalizing the channel’s brand.’ They’re betting on young audiences, and I’d get, as they saw it, a mega bonus: the youth talk show. You know the drill: Just say no to sex without a condom; we met in a karaoke bar, and so on,” she stumbles, swallows the lump that’s come up in her throat (assholes! assholes!) to finish. And then there’s the Miss New TV beauty pageant—but no, she’ll leave out that new part of the programming; it’s not fit for Mom’s ears—one shouldn’t tell such things to museum workers of advanced age.

“What carry-oakie bar?” Olga Fedorivna asks, dejected.

Once again, Daryna feels her eyes fill with tears. What’s the point of rubbing it in like this—for her mom, or for herself? Of all people to whine to.

“Doesn’t matter, Mom, that’s just an example. They want me to wear braids. Revitalize my image, you know, make it easier for the target audience to relate. You’ve seen those commercials: generation jeans, everything and at once?”

“Did they all lose their cotton-picking minds?”

Olga Fedorivna’s voice prickles with sharp, rejuvenated notes that bring on, in a hazy fade-in, a vision in Daryna’s mind from more than thirty years ago: a trim brunette in a bright yellow dress marching across the kindergarten yard beside a flummoxed teacher to whom she is reading the riot act, while little Darynka looks on through the window of the dining room, where she’d been locked up after dinner to finish the hateful sour cream—a whole glass of goo that she, in desperation, forever abandoned by everyone, sits straining, with disgust, through her puckered lips, which does nothing to lower the level of the white gunk under her nose. She looks on and a blast of joy shoots through her both for the knowledge of her imminent liberation—Mom’s here!—and the shock of her first experience of seeing from outside: this is my mom—how beautiful she is! If only you could always remember your parents the way they were in their best years. But there’s never time for that, because you’ve got bigger fish to fry—your own best years, which, just like theirs, pass, damn it. They pass.

The thing that really got her was that her producer never, not for a second, doubted that their offer would flatter her, that she’d be delighted by the mere fact she’d been deemed suitable for a youth talk show. And worse yet—she did, for an instant, feel flattered. Like when the driver of the car next to her at a stoplight sent her air kisses, like when men in foreign airports occasionally turn to look at her (and she could be completely sure that they didn’t recognize her, that the lit-up looks and the uncontrollably loose grins were meant not for a TV star but simply for a beautiful woman, because at home you could never tell the difference—men look at attractive women and celebrities in the same way), like when a black Lexus sped up and slammed on the brakes next to her in the street, sending a fan of water into the air, so she barely managed to jump out of the way, and from behind the rolled-down window appeared the mug of a boy umpteen years her junior to say, in a leisurely Russian, like a restaurant order: “Leave your phone number, miss.” (And only when she laughed into his face, could she see by his changed expression that he recognized her, fired up with a different, more preemptive interest—here it is, the power of the media: “Wait… don’t you… don’t you work on TV?”)

Such things always pleased her, she won’t deny it; they gave her new zest. For a moment, she was almost hypnotized, listening to her boss tell her about herself: they’ll style your hair into braids, for a “frisky,” as he put it, look, and dress you more casually, youthfully, from Benetton, something informal, a little top, shorts and over-the-knee boots, a miniskirt. What paralyzed her was not so much his tone of an old seducer as her own eternally feminine eagerness—to submit, spellbound, to the hands of a designer, stylist, makeup artist… anyone who would make her different, better; and the audience, ready to appreciate their efforts, is right there. The salesgirl hands you a few more skirts that go, in her opinion, with the jacket you’re trying on in the fitting room, while the man sits with his newspaper in an armchair waiting for you to come out and sashay around the store, turning in front of the mirror and smoothing the skirt over your thighs and behind, as though molding your own body—you’re your own Pygmalion, the outfit your marble: What do you think? For that one moment, in yesterday’s entire conversation, she did feel ashamed, but she won’t tell her mother about it, no way, and her mom wouldn’t understand it anyway. She’s never set foot in an expensive boutique and, really, it’s not like Uncle Volodya could sit in that armchair waiting for the shape-shifting séance with the Sphinx smile of a man who will pay for everything in the end. No, their generation did not get to experience as many of life’s joys as ours, and isn’t this precisely what makes us, in our heart of hearts, look down on them?

“That’s right, Mom, and that’s exactly what I told him—and that I won’t be made into a public spectacle.”

That was not what she said, not what she said at all. She only knocked him off his tone—a bed-broker’s business tone in which he proceeded to wrap her up and tie her with a bow. She went to the edge of his desk and perched there like a stripteuse, jerked up her sweater, flashed him with her bare belly and asked him in that angrily ringing voice whose cracked shards can still—who knew—sometimes be heard in her mother’s voice, “And how about my navel—have it pierced, or are you chicken?”

He broke off, forgetting to shut his mouth, dithered, and waved her off, meaning, stop it—but got back on track right away, regained his balance, glibbed with a chuckle, “Yum, I’d like a piece of that!” But from that moment on, spoke with her as with an equal, an accomplice. (How apt that old actress had been who told her once, after a session, when they were sitting in the old woman’s pauper kitchen drinking tea with biscuits that had obviously been diligently scrubbed clean of mold before being served: “When push comes to shove, sweetie, it is better to be a whore than a thing.”) All she did was shove him a step off the top of the mountain where he’d clambered and stood, triumphantly, engrossed in self-admiration, and then rolled, rambling, down all by himself, dragging her with him and scraping her bloody along the way; but that part—about her boss, about R.—was not for telling Mom either, that was for her to figure out on her own.

“And what did he say to that?” Olga Fedorivna persists, apparently still clinging to something, something that looks to her like hope. Daryna feels a small stab of annoyance. When she was young, her mother’s insistence on using details to shield herself from reality, this clinging to small things (after Daryna’s father’s death she kept telling everyone how well he ate the day he died—porridge, carrot juice) used to drive her to distraction, made her want to slap her mother: Wake up, already! Youth has no idea yet of the effort the art of survival demands—it is an incredibly vacuous age. And we’re at such pains to stretch it out for as long as possible.

“Mom, you’re like the sheriff in Natalka Poltavka: and what’d you say to that, and what’d she say to you?”

It’s not like she could tell her how the boss went on to explain to her, as an intelligent woman, all the obvious advantages of the new course. First playing to her weakness (no one could say he didn’t know his personnel!)—her incurable need to be liked, the curse of the good girl (with, of course, what else, big bows in her braids) that’s been hanging around her neck her entire life; to have people applaud, to be praised, wow, Darynka’s such a smart girl, did such a nice job reciting that poem!—and then appealing to her ambitions, of which there are plenty. How else? Who would ever agree, if they had no ambition, to dunk their visually rounded mug like a goldfish into millions of living-room aquariums twice a week: This is Diogenes’ Lantern, and I am Daryna Goshchynska…. We’ll be back after a break… (The cosmic blackness on the other side of the studio floodlights aimed at her—effectively blinding her—seem to be populated, like a giant auditorium stretching out to infinity. It’s as if millions of eyes are looking at her from there, and every time, even after seven years on air, it seems people are sitting out there, very still, waiting, ready to creak their chairs, cough if she strikes a false note, even though there are no chairs in the studio except the one under her; she can feel that populous held breath in the space between her and the screen, the eyes of those to whom she speaks—they hold her up as water holds a swimmer.)

Boss leaned hard on the new “scale”—another ace slapped onto the table (the table in his office was now imposing, oak, fit for a game of pool)—and the scale did impress: prime-time promotion, billboards and ads on the subway; they’ll make her into a cult figure of the new generation. What the hell else does she want? He strutted; he was proud of himself—it occurred to her that it was he, in fact, who wanted to earn her praise, as would any man from a smart and beautiful woman, but still something was off: something was gnawing at him; there was a gap, a hole he wanted her to help close.

Just recently, about a month before, they were celebrating his housewarming—he’d moved into a new apartment, a magnificent, newly renovated, two-story next to the Opera Theater. It had to have set him back half a million bucks at least—the expansive living room with a brick fireplace, the marble-finished bathrooms like Roman thermae. And it was there, while the guests were touring the pantheonic bathrooms, to their happy laughter (pierced, time and again, like expensive upholstery with stubbed-out cigarettes, with uncontainable, hissing ahhs of envy), that Antosha, their cameraman whom they’d dubbed Occam’s Razor for his fast adherence to the principle of finding the most basic explanation for every human action and for being almost never wrong (“If your cynicism is what’s called the wisdom of life, Antosha,” she used to say, half-kidding, “then I wish to die stupid.” And he answered with his latent alcoholic’s suggestively loony half-grin, “You should be so lucky, hon!”), grunted, quiet and short, like a spit: “That’s it, the boss hit some big-ass pay dirt; time to jump this rig.” Meaning their channel, which was already sinking fast, turning, like all the others, into a corporation, a front for some uncouth money-laundering enterprises, and their captain, their boss and breadwinner, their producer and co-founder, drenched in sweat, as if he’d come from the shower, darted, like a halfback on a football field, across his cavern of a living room from one VIP to another, desperately ingratiating himself: Pyotr Nikolaich, have some sushi. You like it, don’t you? Aleksei Vasil’yich, a drop of vodka? (There weren’t many of them at the party, those men of Vadym’s ilk, with identical occiputs sunk into soft cushions of fat that make their heads resemble pool balls dropped straight onto their shoulders; Daryna knew almost none of them—there weren’t many, but a single type like that is enough to spoil an evening.)

And at some point, after another one of his bendings-over-backwards, the boss must have caught Daryna looking at him—probably sneering a bit. But no, she must’ve been still sympathetic, because at the time she still thought this was all for the channel’s sake, that the boss was slavering the movers and shakers for their collective sake, for the cause, to keep the channel afloat—ate shit, bless his soul, every day so that Goshchynska could grow flowers on the air. Well, flowers always grow on shit, and television is no different from a beautiful woman: Does anyone blowing her kisses through his car’s window wonder about the inner workings of her guts, about the smack of fecal matter inside her intestines, whose regularity, by the way, is directly responsible for her radiant complexion? Except that here it wasn’t fecal but financial flows that were being pumped and someone did have to insure their regularity.

That’s what she thought, pinching her delicate little nose, because in that gigantic tele-organism the role she was meant to play, after all, was not that of the colon but rather of the radiant visage, “the face of the channel.” And under that understanding look of hers, extended to him over the well-fed shoulders and masticating heads, the boss, as if waking up from a dream, suddenly looked triumphantly, conspiratorially, over his smoke-filled cavernous salon, literally smoothed the salon over himself—just like a woman, out of the dressing room, smoothes a new skirt over her thighs—gathered it all in, weighed it, and offered it to her, the whole thing with himself in the middle, with the same feminine inquiring anxiety in his look: What do you think? As if she were the one who held the controlling interest, as if the whole show would instantly lose its meaning without her approval.

She remembers it seemed really funny to her at the time, and she laughed at him from across the table (she’d had too much to drink), saluting him with her glass in a mute toast: Cheers, sweetheart, here’s to you! And Lord, how he bloomed in return, glowing as if she’d lifted a rock off his shoulders, lightened his burden! And she had no clue that by then the channel’s fate was, must have been, already decided. Antosha, as always, had been right, and the controlling interest was being passed into someone else’s hands entirely—the ones that took her by the throat yesterday, using her boss’s hands to do the work. The same boss who saw her as an accomplice and continued to need her approval: You’re on the right path, comrades! Kiss my ass, asshole.

It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?, she asks in her head—not of her mother (she doesn’t talk to her mother in her head) but of Adrian, with whom she is also unlikely to share this observation out loud because it’s not the kind of thing that you share with anyone, period—where do they all go, these observations that no one ever shares with anyone and that just gather dust in the dark corners of people’s brains? It’s hard to believe how much in this life is determined, sometimes, by a single accidental phrase, a single look—a conspiratorial glance, an encouraging expression across the room, just like that—and someone picks it up eagerly, grabs your hand, and drags you into their cabal, lifting the lid on such a teeming subterranean nest of worms that you would have preferred not to have seen, never even wanted to know existed.

And it all starts with the commonest little misunderstanding—you were simply misunderstood. The world is full of crossed signals, and no one really understands anyone anymore. Such scale, such opportunities, such a leap in her career—what is wrong with her? The boss really could not understand, and if he were pretending, then only very little. And what about her project, her unfinished film? He blinked when she asked about that, as if trying to remember: What film? He’d forgotten already, he had erased that file from his memory—some people are lucky like that, they have the serendipitous gift of forgetting everything unnecessary. “The one about the UIA or something?”

“You know what he said to me, Ma? About my Lantern? He said no one needs my heroes. That they are not the heroes in touch with the times.”

In touch with the times, how wonderfully apt—it slashed her like a blade. Pyotr Nikolaich, Aleksei Vasil’yich—they’ve bought this time, just as they bought airtime. They thought themselves the major figures, no, the only heroes of life’s written drama; they believed, especially for themselves, and they lived their lives with this belief—until the last control shot to the head. But the boss, the boss! He’s not one of them; he’s not of their breed. He was a talented journalist once; he made that fantastic film in the early nineties, about the little Chernivtsi kids who’d gone bald. (A rocket fuel spill at a nearby army base, wasn’t it? The city should’ve really been evacuated—wait, wait, but the story somehow got hushed down after that, never came up again, and, just a minute, if she recalls correctly, the man who was investigating the cause of the disaster, a local, didn’t he disappear, die quietly under mysterious circumstances?) If she’s not mistaken? It’s hard not to be mistaken, hard to keep it all straight in her memory, when the memory’s long overburdened, the system’s overloaded, and her head has long ago turned into a computer box, cluttered, with snippets of film, with frames of unidentified provenance, shots of who-knows-where and faces with names unstuck from them (this has happened a thousand times: the face—you recognize, the person—no). And she tells herself she’s delivering information to people, but all she actually does is add to the piles of snippets in their heads and so help them forget because she doesn’t remember squat herself, except whatever’s blinking right in front of her, on whatever narrow strip is cleared of rubbish to fit in what’s due today.

Shit, what if she is really in the wrong business?

“They’re the ones out of touch,” Olga Fedorivna responds, bitterly, and Daryna vaguely registers that she invests these words with something private, invisible, and inaccessible to her. And then her mother adds, though it’s not clear about whom, “Roaches.”

A rickety bridge is in those words, a narrow plank thrown from one bank to the other. Daryna can sense it but has no time to listen to it; she’s riding her own current—and not only out of the pure momentum of an active life that never really hears those who’d dropped out of the system (Because what could they possibly tell us—the retired, the jobless, the homeless, the bankrupted, the crumpled wrappers swept to the edge of the sidewalk where we click-clack so dashingly along in our brand-new Bally heels that they’ll never be able to afford?) but because she is, quite simply, overrun with indignity, great and intolerable. She’s got a fresh hole gaping inside her, and she’s just begun to mend it. She’s too busy attending to herself, like Uncle Volodya with his arthritis. (The conversation with the boss, retold to her mother in a slightly different edition from the one for Adrian the night before, acquires new contours in her mind in the course of retelling, in being fit together; this is the only thing that’s important to her at the moment—to redub and edit yesterday’s footage in her memory into such form as can be turned into an asset and lived with from now on.) All she needs is a grateful audience with supportive oohs, but her mom keeps falling out of character and darting off track, still somehow failing to grasp into which molds she’s supposed to fit and to turn into ice. She’s getting old, that’s a fact: losing her flexibility, losing her quickness. But “roaches”—there’s something to it: Mother does have a feel for words, not for nothing did she write poems when she was young, but then again, who didn’t back then, in the sixties. The boss now strikes Daryna as not unroach-like at all, despite the fact that he never wore mustache. It would fit him. A sort of neurotic jerking of the nose, which became more conspicuous the more nervous he got yesterday—like he’s constantly smelling something disgusting. Antosha even maintained, for a long time already, that the boss had to be doing cocaine, and after last night Daryna was inclined to believe it. A man can’t just live in that cloaca; he’s got to do something at least about the smell.

“You know what I’m really sorry about, Ma? That story I had planned for next week, did I tell you about it?”

“You never tell me anything.”

Here we go—the guilt trip.

“That’s not true, I do. The story was really heroic, no spin—about a surgeon from a district town in Donets’k Oblast, one of those, you know, mining ghost towns where every living thing has fled, and three-room apartments go for three-hundred bucks, and whole city blocks stand vacant. The surgeon’s salary is two-hundred-and-forty hryvnas, less than your pension. So, he gets called to emergency surgery in the middle of the night, and runs out—the streets are dark, no lights—and falls into a hole, and breaks his leg; then crawls like that, one leg broken, all the way to his hospital somehow, where he does the surgery. And only afterward lets them take him to the trauma unit—they had two gurneys ready after the surgery, one for the patient, and the other for his doctor. Men like that still live in this country. Tell Uncle Volodya so at least his colleagues will know.”

What she does not say, because it smarts like a fresh cut, is how she’d spoken to the man on the phone just the other day when arranging for the film crew. He had a wonderfully kind voice, cozy like felt slippers, and he stuttered a bit, must’ve been taken aback—imagine that, TV was coming all the way from Kyiv to talk to him.

And right after that they called her into the boss’s office. What Donets’k Oblast? Who cares? Forget it! Boss even switched to Russian as he always does when he loses self-control. The Donets’k Oblast was now to be portrayed as a land of sweeping prosperity, practically Switzerland, or better still, not portrayed at all. And then he said that thing about her heroes—that no one needs them; the show is cancelled. How to look that doctor in the eye now?

And Mom, having ooh’ed at her daughter’s every word with hungry attention, proceeds to rub salt into the fresh wound. She waxes poetic that exactly, exactly the people like this surgeon are the backbone of this country—like she’s tapping her pointer on an exhibit for the benefit of an invisible tour group: “These are the kind of people who hold this world together, have held it since creation, and they must be known! Because when you don’t know such people are out there, it is very hard to go on living.”

She is speaking about herself, Daryna suddenly realizes. About how she once had to go on living without that knowledge—for how many years? Seven? No, more than that—living as the wife of a certified schizoid. Engineer Goshchynsky had also once crawled like that at night along his very dark street with a broken leg—until they broke his spine, too. And all around, everyone else was normal, and no one crawled anywhere—people bought furniture and went on vacations to Sochi. Like we go to Antalya now. Those who didn’t go did not have a voice then and don’t have it now, and we’re better off not knowing they exist at all.

A museum worker made eighty rubles a month. Uncle Volodya, a rich man by Soviet standards, after the wedding also took his Olya to Sochi. They wanted Daryna to come, too, but back then she was so angry that she signed up for the student harvest brigade instead and bedded Sergiy on the second night of the trip, on his windbreaker spread out on the sand. He had to throw it out afterward. From that first time, the thing she remembered most vividly was the draft between her legs, when she lay under the sky with her panties off. That, and the triumphant knowledge that she and her mother were now equals, that she couldn’t be told what to do. It’s possible that if it weren’t for Sergiy—if the wind-breaker didn’t unfold into long nights of wandering, poems on a boat, and her tears on his chest (wet stains on his T-shirt—she was marking the poor guy from all her glands)—she would’ve slept with the whole brigade that summer, would’ve erected a paling of phalluses between herself and her mother, not knowing then, in the blindness of her youth, that it’s not a way out. There is never a way out from one’s mother; it’s life without parole.

For the first time in her life, Daryna realizes she had never tried to imagine—as if she passed a door a thousand times and it never occurred to her to peek inside—how, in fact, her mother lived all those dark years that were now stored in her attic in the four bulging folders knotted shut. How did she endure, frozen into Snow Maiden’s trim, upright form, Father’s entire hopeless struggle, and the crushing bulk of her environment, and the fear creeping under the doors, the bandits in the stairwell, vans with red crosses on them, the Dnipropetrovsk asylum, and afterward—three years of wandering in and out of hospitals with the urine-soaked remnant of what once had been the man she loved, without the knowledge, back then, that he was not the only one, that others were also crawling into their own dead ends, a whole, uncountable in the dark army of defeat’s heroes?

And then she married again—and got heavy within a year, like all of her folded, suddenly crumbled, even her face. Uncle Volodya taught her to eat well, unlocked her dormant culinary talents. In the years her father was committed, those talents wouldn’t have been of any use; the two of them mostly lived on boiled potatoes. Daryna loved them when she was little, and still does—mashed, peasant-style, with sour milk, sprinkled with parsley if you have some—what’s not to like? A teenager has other problems, and adult children do, too, and you always miss your parents in time. And generally, living side by side with someone does not mean bearing witness to his or her life. But how did she endure, all the way until Father’s death, what held her?

Daryna recognizes very clearly that this question is now directly relevant to her own life: yesterday she, too, closed a door that no one will be in a great rush to open in order to find out how she’s doing in there. She’s already felt the grip of emptiness, the air of solitary confinement—yesterday, after leaving boss’s office, when she curtly informed her guys that Lantern had been cancelled and that she would not be working in the new format she’d been offered. (But nothing about the Miss New TV show!) She was not, of course, expecting the guys to rouse the whole channel to a general strike in protest. (Or did she, in her heart of hearts?) Besides, everyone’s been waiting for something nasty like this for a long time and this turbid anticipation weighed on them. Even the jokes in the smoking rooms were getting blacker and dirtier by the day, and while the storm clouds gathered on the horizon, folks began cutting out, resigning, scampering away like little mice, but something else stung her: that the guys, after they cursed and vented their shared bile (because the Lantern was their common brainchild, conceived and gestated together, a hacked-off chunk of their lives) and asked her if she was really going to leave the channel (and whether she had her eye on anything, oh yes, they were most curious about that), were suddenly no longer with her—she felt it: they withdrew inside, let her slip from the grip of their attention. Every one of them was already busy assessing his own prospects, scheming which way to paddle and how to recalibrate himself, and she was already outside the circle, standing there with everything she left unsaid scrunched into a crooked grin on her lips like one hose leg pulled on.

Vovchyk, her director of so many years that they were basically family, even he made this unpleasantly preoccupied face, as if he’d just remembered some very important business, when she said the thing about banditry and whoring—that she was not about to be part of that, and she realized that Vovchyk would stay, under whatever ownership, and would be part of that, and was offended by her determination not to, by her instantly taking away his one shot at not feeling like a piece of shit while he did what he was going to do. Here’s the first person who’s happy to see her go; start the count, who’s next?

Of course, she was in no danger of eating mashed potatoes for lunch and dinner—she was merely in the same danger that awaits all outsiders: the danger of loneliness. Sit at home with your man (and thank the Good Lord that you have a decent man!) and eat your moral superiority all you want, while life races on without you. As soon as you disappear from the screens, everyone’ll forget about you—better people have been forgotten. It’s not the movies, hon (as Antosha says), not some classic locked into a vault, with a small chance of coming back to light one day—this is television. The show must go on. And she’s always been in public and with the public; she loves the public and is used to being loved in return—and how’s she to endure all this now, on moral superiority alone?

And, almost surprising herself, not thinking about the words, just the way it bursts out of her, head first into the deep end, Daryna asks her mother, “Mom, did you believe in Dad?”

Pause.

“I mean, when they took him away?”

Mom understood the question—remarkably she is not surprised by this turn of their conversation; she is simply looking for words she doesn’t have readily available; she’s working through the thickets of the many years of silence inside her.

“I knew that everything he was doing was right.”

“Did it make things easier for you?”

“Sweetie, is ‘right’ always easy?”

This comes out with such overwhelming, ancient sadness that for a moment Daryna is petrified. Her mother may not be a hero, but you couldn’t call her stupid either.

“No. Not always.”

Both grow silent then, sensing themselves on unfamiliar territory and hesitating before the next step. Olga Fedorivna suddenly chuckles softly—from afar, as if really from the other side of thirty years.

“You know, I never told you this… when Tolya was in Dnipropetrovsk…” (This Tolya startles Daryna like a tang of a string: usually Mother says Father or Dad, but now she is talking about a man she had once loved, and not to her daughter but to a grown woman, maybe even to herself.) “in daytime I could somehow manage to keep my mind busy—at work, the tour groups saved me, and then I had to find food; back then it was another full-time job, to stand in all those lines. I remember on a Sunday once I’d gone to every market—Zhytni, Sinny, Lukyanivsky, Volodymyrsky—no meat anywhere, they all sold out before dawn! And you had anemia then, and the school doctor said…” (How strange, Daryna thinks—she remembers none of that, only remembers that her period started later than other girls’ and for a long time she was troubled by the feeling that she’d suddenly slipped from the top of her class in everything to the bottom, and when she finally “had visitors” she was so thrilled she bragged to another straight-A student, Oksana Karavayeva, “I’m a young woman now!” and Oksana sneered into her face and said, “So go buy yourself a medal!”) “you had to have meat, even if just a little, even mixed with bread into cutlets, and it was all just empty shelves all around. I’ll try the Besarabsky Market yet, I thought; that’s a chance. So I went all the way there, and it was getting dark already—and they were locking up, right under my nose…. I just fell against a wall and wailed out loud! That I cried, that was the first time—after they took Tolya, for a long time I couldn’t. Went all hard inside, a piece of wood. At night, after I was done cleaning, washing everything…” (Daryna’s memory helpfully retrieves the long-forgotten: the humid haze of laundry in the apartment, steam from the sheets being boiled on the stove, windows in the kitchen fogged, and the wooden handle from an old butterfly net with which her mother, hair wet and face glistening with sweat, like a dockhand, turned the bedsheets, which distended into giant bubbles above the rim of the enormous pot. Did she do laundry almost every other day on purpose back then, to help her forget?) “after I make it all clean, and you’re already asleep—that’s when I was fit to climb up the wall! And no sleep, none, no matter how much I’d worn myself out. I better figure something out lest I lose my mind, I thought. So I thought this up: I’d lie down and close my eyes, and start playing movies in my head. I’d lie there and imagine Tolya’s come back already, so handsome, finer than before, and that they restored the Palace Ukraina the way it was at first—I’d see every little piece of parquet in my mind, how they’re laid out, like shadows, this chimerical optical effect it made—and that they’re giving Tolya medals up on the stage, everyone thanking him for saving such beauty, saying it’s all his work, he did it…. Everyone rises, and applauds, and they bring in flowers, big basket arrangements, and set them on the proscenium like on an opening night—and I’m sitting in the box, in an evening gown with open shoulders; Tolya used to say I had Bryullov shoulders and it was a sin ever to hide them, they were a national treasure…” (Daryna remembers her mom’s bright yellow dress, also, yes, with a portrait collar—her high neck, hair done up; the dress had lasted until she met Uncle Volodya, who must have also decided that such shoulders shouldn’t go to waste—Mom must’ve worn that dress for at least ten years, not much room for new clothes in eighty rubles a month with a teenage daughter.) “and I’d lie there like that, and dream, and dream, all so nice, like I’m putting a spell on myself—until I fall asleep. All the while knowing perfectly well, crystal clear,” Olga Fedorivna chuckles again, as if confessing to some childhood mischief, “that I’m making it all up, that it’s not there and won’t ever be—but it still feels better. Like a sort of drug.”

“Daydreaming,” Daryna squeezes out, trying to make it sound considered (all diagnoses always sound considered, even the deadly ones). “It’s a term in psychology.”

“Really?” Olga Fedorivna responds absentmindedly. The fact that a secret game she’d invented for herself and never told a soul in thirty years (One wonders, what does she talk about with her current husband?) has apparently been classified, named, and filed in the corresponding drawer with a label on the front, fails to impress her.

Generally speaking, Olga Fedorivna has little patience for generalizations, an instinctive distrust of them whether they are scientific terms or political concepts—she doesn’t hear them, doesn’t remember them, still doesn’t know the difference between liberalism and democracy or what a civil society is—they’re all men’s games for her, only relevant to her own life inasmuch as they can one day ruin it.

It occurs to Daryna that she’s inherited from her mother much more than she’s used to thinking she has. Her ability to play movies, too, it would seem—only Daryna’s movies have always been played for a wide release, always with the question of how to transfer them to the screen and show others, and her mother’s were produced for an audience of one.

Now that’s a show she’d love to make: Wouldn’t it be something to capture on film all those fantasies people spin inside their minds to help them survive? Daydreaming on screen—television of the future! A great project, one has to admit, especially for a retired anchorwoman. Well, now that she’s been retired (No, after she has retired herself; let’s be clear about that!), she’ll have plenty of opportunity to dream up, without any constraints, like her mother once did, as many wonderful, sleep-inducing projects as she pleases, never worrying about bringing them to life. She’ll be the creator of her own private virtual reality, protected from everyone’s dirty hands. Clean ones too, unfortunately. A magnifi-cent prospect—might as well go hang herself right now. Really, not that different from getting on the needle.

Still, something in what she’s just heard gnaws at Daryna, something’s stuck, like a fish bone between the teeth, and she stubbornly keeps pushing her tongue there—to pry it out.

“Daydreaming can be dreaming while awake. Or dreaming with one’s eyes open. Dreaming in a conscious state.”

“Of course it’s conscious, that’s what I’m telling you,” confirms Olga Fedorivna, as if she’s surprised that her daughter hasn’t taken her words on faith and needs to have something translated from somewhere else as further proof, while she, the mother, has already told her everything essential. “It’s not like hallucinations or something, God forbid!” (Oh yes, Daryna recognizes this, too; it’s their family legacy, the fear in their blood: it only takes one certified nutcase in the family, with a firmly affixed label—never mind that’s it’s fake—to keep them forever spooked, seeing the menacing shadow of insanity at every step. The “acute paranoid psychopathy” label they’d affixed to her father may not have implied any hallucinations, but “having obsessive ideas” was certainly enough for a diagnosis; and the kind of ideas considered obsessive were the ones you wouldn’t give up, even with such persuasive entreaties as a blow to the head on a dark stairwell.) “It was just me, thinking up this beautiful, beautiful fairytale for myself, just like the ones I used to tell you before bed when you were little. And I got so used to it sometimes, even at work during the day, I’d catch myself thinking that something really nice was waiting for me at home that night—the way it had been with Tolya.”

Oh, so that’s the way it had been with Tolya. Daryna knows well this joy of a day brightened through, in every detail, by the anticipation of a night of lovemaking—only for some reason her mother’s naïve confession (which instantly opens the door to a whole pressing mass of other far-reaching speculations about her sexual life, with Uncle Volodya included, and her mother obviously doesn’t know how much she’s just revealed about herself, more than in the whole twenty years of their diplomatic negotiations) instead of moving her, reverberates in Daryna as a dull pain: an echo of her old filial revolt, perhaps, from which she emerged armed with an unassailable youthful certainty that she would never, under any circumstances, let any man dominate her, or maybe a vast, accumulated sympathy for her mother then and pity for her now, all at once.

Daryna’s always known that she was a love child, and, as she got older, in her own relationships with men stumbled upon just such pieces of direct evidence, loosened up from the depths of her childhood memories, that her parents had been very happy together. For decades, those childhood impressions lay preserved inside her, waiting for the searchlight of adult experience to bring them out of the dark: here’s their family, coming home from a walk, and Dad lets Mom go ahead of him on the stairs, remaining to stand, with the little Daryna, below, his head thrown back, looking up, and then rushes, laughing, to catch up with Mom, jumping over two steps each time, and they tussle and giggle somewhere up there, on the next floor, forgetting in that moment about her completely. The way Adrian loves chasing her up the stairs now. Though it’s Sergiy to whom she owes this discovery; he was the first to confess he couldn’t help himself when her watched her move from behind (back then, before she knew men, she received this information with acute curiosity, and instantly recalled the expression on her father’s face when he stood on the landing with his head tossed back).

It took her until about second grade to wrap her mind around the notion that Mom and Dad at one point actually met each other as complete strangers, who may not have met at all, and then she wouldn’t be here—and then she set to deposing them with a prosecutor’s persistence about exactly how they met. You could say it was her first interview, and she remained quite unhappy with it as with all her interviews before today (yesterday, yesterday!). She was after nothing other than a ready-made story that would have shown conclusively that Mom and Dad did not meet by accident at all, that it couldn’t have been otherwise, and that they’d fallen in love at first sight and for all time. And Mom and Dad, like a pair of high-school punks, stole the initiative and took the game in their own direction, incomprehensible for an eight-year-old. They goofed, shot, outdrawing each other, completely irrelevant, as they seemed to her, details, like snowballs, interrupted each other gleefully, mocking. And you said… —No, it was you who said… —Pish, I’d never. Who d’you think you are?—Yeah, right, you just keep saying that after you couldn’t take your eyes off of me! Mom giggled like a girl who got a note from a boy in class—something she had no, in little Darynka’s furious opinion, mommy right to do. Exactly as Aidy loves recasting their first meeting in humorous terms, loves improvising, in jest, new treatments for the same plot—how he barged into her studio, and she hissed at him like a cat, but her legs, hey, he took good stock of those legs right there and then, and resolved he mustn’t let them slip by!—and she giggles exactly the way her mom did, and tosses snowballs back at him. Now she knows what a bottomless source of renewal it is for every love to return to its origins, to the beginning, and how all this play reaffirms in you the sense of having triumphed over life (because you can only play with what’s yours, yours alone, what belongs to you and what no one can take!).

Now she’s sorry she was such an inept interviewer back then. That in her demands for a story she failed to remember the details—only retained a general vague image, like in a snow globe: her parents are young; they’re laughing; and their faces, back then, half-buried in the snowdrifts of time, are like a source of light inside the glass.

“Why are you quiet?” her mother asks, across the span of thirty years.

Why? Because that love’s gone, and nothing’s left. Unless, of course, you count her, Daryna Goshchynska. (Who was it that just recently addressed her by patronymic, and with a kind of suggestive emphasis, too?) Daryna Anatoliivna Goshchynska, a retired television journalist, not quite forty years of age, who is languishing in bed at eleven a.m. like a log, with cheeks wet with tears, and has nowhere to go—not exactly a great, when you think about it, contribution to humankind. It is foolish to think that children set something right somewhere, do some sort of justice, supply the crowning achievement, or a purpose for anything. Love has no purpose beyond itself—every love has its own life and its own biography; it is a separate creature.

Once upon a time there had been a love in this world, Olya and Tolya—“Otollya” as they used to sign postcards to friends—had been and then stopped being. Just stopped, for technical reasons—in conjunction with one signatory’s departure. And that’s it? Just like that? You leave life, disappear from the screen, and that’s all it takes for your love to vanish, too? The love that had buoyed you up for years?

She doesn’t say anything because she doesn’t know how to ask her mother: What did she do with her love? Did she archive it somewhere inside, tying the strings into a dead knot? Or, did she switch its tracks like Kyiv’s streetcar drivers used to do back in the in the seventies—by hand, with an iron hook—and set to finish loving Uncle Volodya with the same underlived, interrupted love that was so cruelly mangled halfway? Was it really possible that it was the same love that still went on for her? Because all that savage energy of the soul that is called love—the one that can cut you down with the force of a direct blow when you’re dusting the desk on which he used to unroll his blueprints, or when you find in a drawer an old scarf that still holds his smell, or simply anywhere, for no visible reason—cuts you down, the tidal wave of it knocks you off your feet and all you can do is fall where you stood and howl like a beast without words: Where is he? Why is he gone?—all this energy cannot possibly just disappear, it has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?

When she was young, Daryna did not think about these things, of course; back then, her only desire was to escape as soon as possible from her crippled family, which couldn’t do better than to hatch Uncle Volodya and his moronic medical jokes—one big taunt like a fart into navy sweatpants. And without any of that “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively” that once caused her departed father so much trouble. Unlike Hamlet, she acted, for being only nineteen, rather decisively. (Told herself as soon as she spotted Sergiy—this one!—and when, the following night, he, inflamed by her hurried, eager availability—take me, I’m right here!—drilled into her, thrown onto the sand, with his unexpectedly hard and hot member, she couldn’t help herself, even though she’d squeezed her eyes shut like she was at the dentist’s—so as not to see the instruments—and yelped with pain. Poor Sergiy all but got a stutter from the shock of this being her first time, enough to traumatize the boy for life. She was lucky it turned out okay—Sergiy was very moved, stroked her hair, and whispered “my baby” to her, and that’s when she burst into tears, burying her face in his gray, as she clearly remembers, T-shirt, into his chest, because after her father this was the first man’s hand that had stroked her hair.)

Hamlet, to be totally frank, had a much easier time being decisive. After all, his father died a king, and the son had all the right to shove the two portraits into his mother’s face and point out: this had been your husband, and this is your husband, and tut at you, dear Mother. What assets did she, Daryna, have, except perhaps these memories of her early childhood, still warmed with love, elusive and tingling like a dream you can’t remember in the morning but that makes you ache with the sense of irreparable loss? And then, right away, the next frame: the yellow knobby bones with the feet sticking out from under the robe, the permanent, inextinguishable smell of urine around the home where you couldn’t invite any of your friends. (In the first months after the asylum, Father could only talk with great effort; his speech later returned, more or less, but the unpleasant strain in it remained until the end, like a person who’s crawling above an abyss and is afraid to lose his footing.) Nothing regal, nothing heroic at all—only the long, inescapable shame of a repressed teenager. And in this version of the play, Gertrude then tried, in vain, to make her daughter understand how much Uncle Volodya sacrificed when he left Father to die in the hospital and spared no painkillers for him: usually such patients were discharged, so they wouldn’t spoil the hospital’s stats with another exitus letalis. A perfectly fraternal act on her stepfather’s part, nothing like Claudius’s: all men of the same woman are in a way brothers (oh no, not all, she refuses to imagine R. and Aidy have anything in common; Aidy’s done nothing to deserve that!).

“Mom, what if I asked you what Dad and Uncle Volodya have in common?”

“He’s kind,” Olga Fedorivna responds instantly, as if she’d been waiting for this question for twenty years. “I’ve always told you—make sure a man’s kind, that’s the most important thing. Seriozha was kind. And Adrian, too.”

For the first time this morning Daryna can’t stifle a smile: the ease with which her mom ties into the same circle her own and her daughter’s men—the ones she knows—makes her forget, for an instant, the bottomless bog her boss had tried to drag her into last night. Images of her life’s kind men spin before her like in the Hutsul arkan dance—they’re all brothers; they all must be introduced to each other, so they all become friends. The circle flickers gathering speed, faster, faster, as it blends into a single being, a collected radiance of a single gaze that glows with tenderness—this lasts no more than an instant, and the vision disintegrates, but, how strange; she feels ever so slightly better, consoled. Somehow, her mother has managed to break her out of her gloom, alleviate the fear of loneliness. No, she won’t bend over for them, hell no. What her boss offered last night was more horrible than solitary confinement. Much more.

Once, in Polissya, Daryna got to see a quag—an unnaturally, acidly bright, motionless pool the color of light pickle mold in the middle of a marsh. From the distance, its utter stillness awed her: a blind, piercingly green eye of death. She remembers her sudden, intense urge to throw something into it—anything, just to break the spell of that uncanny stillness, to see, with her own eyes what it was like, what an end like that looked like, when the darkness sucks you in and there’s nothing to grasp on to; the mere thought of it makes everything inside go numb with terror, but still it lures, beckons to peek in.

There was a moment in the conversation yesterday when she felt that same mucid disorientation. For as long as her boss kept trying to appeal to her ambition, the only emotion she felt boiling inside her was rage. Her ambitions were on a completely different plane, and the boss, while he may have been using the same word, had something completely different in mind. It was as if he stubbornly insisted on calling, say, a table a glass (like the one into which he kept pouring himself cognac, while she barely tasted hers, only felt a headache coming on) and expected her to do the same. He tempted her with access to a humongous—at least thirty percent!—audience, bragged about the channel already buying meters to measure ratings in cities of a half a million people and up—and that’s just to start with, the one hundreds were next—and all she wanted to spit back was: What the heck for? Ukraine’s Got Talent?

He was burying all her professional aspirations alive and had not the slightest inkling of what he was doing. He never felt the studio darkness expand into infinity on the other side of the cam-eras; there was no one sitting in fear for him, ready to cough and creak their chairs in response to any falsity; he couldn’t care less about what he put on the air. Professionalism, for him, meant how, not what, and if the Insurgent Army theme was better left alone for the time being, then it wasn’t worth bothering with at all, and anyway, entertainment programming was the safest niche—he said it exactly like that, using that word, and it made her cringe, and then laugh with all the spite she had in her: ah, the niche again!

Nose already twitching with the nonexistent roach whiskers, he assured her she would be protected from politics, all that dirt, he gave his word. Sure, she’s “the face of the channel,” and it was never her business to care about the provenance of substances that bubble in its guts, so why should it start being her business now? That’s only logical. And then he told her—intimately, a little wearily almost like he’d had enough of her tetchy jibes, her crooked half-grins, and her little bitten-down lips, all of which had the singular purpose, as any idiot could see, of drumming up her price, a pretty woman’s usual ritual resistance before she gives in and takes the hardened dick into her mouth—how much she would be paid. Cash, of course, in an envelope, off the books.

She gasped silently, unsure of what face to make so he wouldn’t notice anything: she felt naked—no one had heard of such salaries in Ukrainian television before; the ceiling was five grand a month, unless, of course, you count those who got their kickbacks in envelopes, directly from their political clients, and their channel was never among the wealthy ones. She’d been getting two, and was fine with that. That’s when it went to her head, spinning, dizzying, for an instant: they could buy an apartment downtown if they sold Aidy’s digs—and better still—oh the impossible dream!—a small house in the country, in some near-Kyiv quaint alpine hamlet; it’s all “Alps” around Kyiv, everywhere you turn—hills, meadows, lakes, ponds, and not everything’s sold yet, although the prices are stratospheric indeed, but all they need is a little patch of land, like in Roslavychi, where Vlada had been planning to live with Vadym. And right away, with dazzling, sobering clarity, it occurred to her that Vlada’s death was also connected to this hidden churn of financial flows—with the invisible gigantic intestine where blood and oil mixed in the same pipe: Vadym was into oil, and Vlada was into Vadym, and she got the blood. What was it she said in that dream—“too many deaths”?

Frozen, Daryna felt the breath of the subterranean bog—its invisible vapors rose against her skin, fogged her mind. Bank accounts’ credit columns endowed with cell-like, self-replicating ability, the flickering of mysterious numbers on computer screens and stock-market monitors: all this was alive—it rose, throbbed, grew, moved. “I’d be curious,” she said to the boss, “I’d be really curious to know—where’s the mother lode?” Boss took it as an expression of admiration and winked, with bravado, just like that time at his housewarming party. “I mean,” she said, not yet aware of how close she’d come to lifting the manhole cover and seeing the blind acidly greenish glimmer below with her own eyes, “don’t get me wrong; I know I’m an expensive woman,…” (he gave her a sleazy snigger) “but I’m also aware that free cheese is only found in the mousetrap—braids don’t fetch that kind of dough!”

That was her swerving off road and cutting straight through the rough—she no longer cared; she knew her cause had already been lost and wanted to have one last satisfaction: to know the mechanism that was behind this, let it be her last journalistic investigation; she’s a professional after all, isn’t she? (For the fall, the anniversary of her friend’s death, she’d planned to make a separate film about Vlada, for Lantern—and for Vlada, too. Yep, and apparently Vlada’s no longer in touch with the times, and Vadym’s been showing up on TV more often, generally looking like he’s got his act together and is doing pretty well; why should we mess with the dead if we’ve got living people lining up, cash in hand?) The Donets’k surgeon, Vlada, Gela Dovganivna, whom she kept postponing, unable to find the key to her story—Lord, how proud she was of her show; how much she loved her heroes, always had butterflies in her stomach when she went to the website to read the viewers’ comments the morning after a new episode had aired. What’s happening to us, how low can we fall, what are we letting them do to us?

No, she did not burst into tears right there, in the boss’s office; she’d held her face screen-proof—like a cream puff, because fury was boiling inside her, and fury demanded action, immediate action. She interrogated; she went on the offensive; she cornered him; she didn’t know she had such breathless pace in her; she rode it like a witch on a broomstick, and he did not realize that this was merely a doomed man’s attempt to extract from his executioner the law that had sent him to the gallows—no, he looked at her with growing respect, as at a woman who was expertly, professionally raising her price. Good job. (She’s run so many times into this astonishing shortsightedness in otherwise intelligent people that she long stopped marveling at it: it was like a virus, increasingly widespread, that affected not only politicians, businesspeople, and members of her own journalistic tribe, but also artists of whom one commonly expects a more complex spiritual organization. Instead of living, people were scheming, playing out their combinations, and anything that was not part of their scheme was simply blocked in their consciousness, as if they had a blind spot.)

Boss really valued her, even the tip of his nose was all sweaty with tension she noted gleefully—she wasn’t the only one on whom the conversation was taking its toll! Alright, he sighed, about to slap his last ace, the joker up his sleeve, onto the table in a grand, bighearted sweep—cards down! He might be able to negotiate a bigger sum for her, he said, he’d do his best—if it works, they’ll “take her in” (he said this in Russian, when the talk turned to money, he switched completely into Russian) on the profits from the Miss New TV show. Is that so? It’s a very serious project, he warned, nervously twitching his sweaty nose (and Diogenes’ Lantern was NOT serious, she dictated mentally to her invisible attorney—the boss’s every word scorched her like a flame), only this must remain strictly between the two of them, okay? (This reminded her of someone else—oh yes, her captain from that office with fake leather doors of 1987 vintage: he also asked with the same sepulchral import for the conversation to remain between them.)

This was in her own interest, by the way, because he had Yurko pegged to host the Miss New TV pageant (Yurko!—she yelped inside—and Yurko will agree?), but only on an official salary—Yurko’s not in on the profits. How about that? They do value her!

“And what kind of show is that?”

“The usual kind, just another show, the main thing’s to select and sort the girls who applied, and then they’d be passed on to a different agency.”

“Meaning what?”

“Well, only a few finalists will appear on the show, you know,” he explained.

And where would the money come from?, she almost asked like the last idiot—and that’s when it finally dawned on her.

“Motherfucker,” she said. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

She thought she was smiling as it sometimes happens to people in shock. Boss’s face hung still before her in close-up, as if someone had hit the pause button (he’d never heard her utter such profanity; the words popped out by themselves, as if they were the last pieces needed to complete the puzzle). And under her gaze, this face, confirming her guess, was collapsing, slipping like a wall in earthquake coverage—from his eyes, where the inquiry (Is something wrong?) was replaced by the flash of realization (She won’t be his accomplice!) to the fright (What has he done?!), a moving shadow, to the deathly bleached wings of his nose, and then to the chin that somehow instantly lost shape and dropped like a clump of wet spackle. In the fraction of a second that she experienced as endlessly long minutes, this man seemed to have disintegrated right before her eyes, and she saw clearly what he would look like in his old age—if, of course, he lived that long. She could smell his fear as one smells the odor of a long-unwashed body. No, this is not a mistake, there’s been no mistake; she understood everything correctly—what kind of “a different agency” it was, and from where the profits were planned to come.

“So, we’re retraining into slave traders?”

“What are you talking about?” Eyes skittering, gathering his face back into a fist, “I haven’t told you anything.”

“And will you tell the girls? Will you tell them what kind of show they’re being invited to?”

“Oh please, give me a break,” he snarled, happy to find himself on solid ground again, on well-trodden territory. “What, you think those girls are all unspoiled goods? Half of them are turning the same tricks for free in their shithole towns and can only dream of being paid for it. They’re the ones signing up in droves in response to those ads for dancers in Europe. You think they don’t know what kind of dancing they’ll be doing? Those floozies’ll be thrilled to get out of their pig farms…”

She didn’t listen after that, something clicked in her ears like when the reel gets chewed up in a tape recorder. He sounded as if he’d memorized this text in advance and had only been waiting for a chance to unload it on someone—after all, one always needs to justify one’s own actions, and blaming the victim is always the murderer’s simplest excuse.

Yurko once managed to interview a professional hit man; they ran the footage with the man’s face hidden, but the killer was unexpectedly articulate, and when Yurko asked what it was like to murder people—what it feels like in action—the man responded with the same memorized preparedness, took it straight out of the gate: “I am not a killer; I am a weapon; I am simply a gun in other people’s hands.” She was astonished, then, to learn that a killer, too, could have his own brand of morality. Did Yurko know what role he’d been assigned? Or, would he repeat, when he found out, his usual joke about “Sergeant Petrenko, father of four”?

They say this legendary Petrenko does, in fact, exist, and appears every so often, like a ghost, on the Boryspil highway where he actually introduces himself that way to the drivers he pulls over: “Sergeant Petrenko, father of four!” Looking on, expectantly, as his victim opens his wallet.

Yurko actually has four kids from three (Isn’t it?) previous marriages, and supports all of them as a decent man should—always looking for side gigs. So does she really have the right to pin him against the wall and force him to choose by revealing the origins of the windfall that’s about to drench him? She tried to remember how many of Yurko’s kids were girls—three, or all four—but for some reason could only recall one of them, the fifteen-year old Nadiyka, who once came to the studio—perfect age for the sex trade, and also with braids, a blonde little thing… a sweet child.

Easy for you to say, Daryna, Yurko might reply, and if he didn’t say it, he’d still think it: you’ve got nothing tying you down; you do with your life as you please; you can slam those doors behind you whenever and wherever you want—and he’d have a point, of course; they’re far from being in the same boat. Still, something has to be done—not police, perhaps, but she’s got to find some resources to publicize this information—to make sure that the fifteen-year-old twits who’ll rush in herds from Zhmerinka and Konotop tomorrow to send their bikini shots into the contest on TV will know what kind of show, damn it, is planned for them!

The boss repeated again that their conversation had to stay inside the office. “And that is something I cannot promise you,” she said—still compelled by her team instinct, her atavistic reflexes, a recurrence of a partner’s duty: cards down, fair play.

“I would not advise you to make a fuss,” the boss answered, with unconcealed hostility. “I rather strongly would advise you not to. Trust me at my word.”

“Or else what?” she said cheerfully. (Looking him straight in the eye, straight in the eye just like dog trainers tell you not to do—as if for seventeen years she’d been spurred on by that captain’s elusive look, which hemmed her in, stitch by quick stitch, in another office, the look she never managed to crack, no matter how much she wanted to peek inside it, see, touch whatever it was that stirred in there, underneath.) “You’ll whack me, too?”

He recoiled as if she’d struck him. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, flashed in her mind. She herself would not have been able to explain why she blurted it out—like a line from a long-accumulated case built for the prosecution. At that moment, she was not thinking at all—forgot all about—that old case in Chernivtsi that had launched the boss’s career, about the uninvestigated death of someone or another. She just flipped open, automatically, in response to his threat, her own hidden blade: pure bluff, improvisation in a fit of inspiration. Her advantage lay in the fact that during the entire conversation she’d felt surreally fearless—as if all this were happening to someone else, as if she’d landed inside a sci-fi movie, no, a Russian gangster miniseries, where she moved with dreamlike lightness.

And that’s when the boss began to scream, as is the custom of all weak and frightened people when they are defending themselves. In the first instant, she wondered if he, perchance, had lost his mind, raving that she ought to know better than to come here and lecture him all Mother Theresa–like… as if they’re all in shit and she’s the only one white and pure, as if she doesn’t sell the goods just like everyone else… when all it took for her was to bang someone like R. and voila, she’d won the channel a lump-sum loan that went, to the last penny, to underwriting her show, so that she could fuck it all up and leave them to clean up the mess… aha, and don’t look at him like that, fucking princess, some star she is… the nation’s conscience, is it?… cunt… he’ll have her know he’s just as good a professional as she!

Have some water, she counseled through her teeth. The sight of a man’s hysteria prompted in her nothing but a cold repulsion, and the drivel he was sputtering at her appeared at that moment so outrageous that it didn’t affect her at all. She had long ago relegated her short, wild affair with R. (who at the time had a seat on their sponsoring bank’s board of directors) to the archives and wished to recall none of it—neither their heavy, dark lovemaking that filled her body with a dull and joyless, bovine satiety (like the feeling one got sometimes after anal sex, only with R. it was every time), nor its worst final chapter when she was doing everything in her power to get away from him, and it was proving to be not at all as easy as she’d thought.

As soon as R. caught a whiff of her intention to desert, he turned aggressive like a bulldog with a bone. Once, he caught her arm and, with a lupine grin, squeezed it hard with two fingers, leaving a bruise that she had to cover with a tennis sweatband for a week afterward.

He hunted her, caught up with her in the worst possible places, brandishing his owner’s right to her to everyone around (he knew this infuriated her the most and hit where she was most vulnerable), ambushed her after work, took her “home” from receptions, where he arrived with the resolute look of a husband who’d come to make a scene (and she tottered out after him, choking on her hatred, like an obedient heron in her high heels, to assault him in the car, later—with her fuming tirade, breathlessly gulping her cigarette, the classic domestic horror).

Weeks after, exhausted and edgy, she finally yelled at him, in a kind of a haze, right in the middle of the street, everything she thought about him and ran in tears into the subway (for some reason the subway seemed the safest place to her—it was impossible to picture R. there). For months she was afraid, when she came home at night that she’d see his Grand Cherokee with its headlights turned off, like a sleeping brontosaurus in the darkness, next to her apartment building’s door.

Her initial infatuation, short-lived and addling like a jinx, took root in her acute curiosity about a breed of men she’d never encountered before: the ones who turn over big money and for that reason radiate an unassailable certainty that they’re also the ones who make the world itself turn on its axis—men of Vadym’s type; she thought she’d finally understood Vlada then.

She probably wouldn’t have fallen for R. so hard if it weren’t for Vlada. As though by doing so, she was walking in her tracks, following her, posthumously. Vlada lay in the overcrowded Baikov Cemetery, where one had to squeeze between graves to get to her like on the subway at rush hour—and Daryna, heart pounding and no underwear in sight, sped in the studio car to the meeting at the bank (back then, the boss always took her to these meetings with him), took a seat next to R., found his hand under the table and pushed it discreetly under her skirt, and listened, giggles and arousal swelling inside her, to his breath change as he fought to control himself so that no one would notice. (Once, finding a moment, he ran after her, shoved her almost brutally into the bathroom, threw her, breasts down onto the sink, and, entering her from behind, roared out like a sea lion in heat, “What a bitch!”)

This game was much more addictive than anything at a casino (where R. had also taken her), and in the early days she was pretty strung out—high on the ease of the power she had over this man, at her bidding to run after her, nose to her crotch like a dog, mowing down, like roadside markers, all the rules that had taken him to the top, and she thought she’d discovered for herself the same feeling that must have attached Vlada to Vadym—the joy of giving a man who used to think himself omnipotent a taste of freedom he had never known before. Only that was as far as any joy went for her with R.: she could never feel herself as just a woman, as one should in honest sex—just a woman, and just a man, the same thing for thousands of years, and new every time. R. never reached that level of freedom.

In a sense, he remained for her as he had begun: a specimen of a different species. At first, their feverish coupling—in his jeep, at his dacha, once even at his friend’s house, in a dark room lit only by the porn flickering on the TV screen—dazed her like a kind of a perversion, like sex with King Kong or Bigfoot, although there wasn’t really anything perverted about it, unless one counted his habit of photographing her in various intimate poses. (She asked then, half-kidding, whom he intended to blackmail with those pictures—because she didn’t give a damn. She was free to sleep with whomever she wanted and didn’t plan to run for Parliament; R. answered, unsmiling, don’t be so sure, leaving her with an uncertain suspicion that he was not, in fact, just shooting his own porn, but planned to keep a file on her just in case, to give him control over her, and in this there was also something acutely arousing, sinfully titillating.)

The turning point came in Holland, where she’d agreed to go with him on a two-week vacation and every morning, when she woke up next to him, felt like she was sticking her head into a bag—and neither the museums, nor the sea, nor the wonderful little seaside restaurant with lobsters, nor the low Rembrandtesque, phantasmagoric light of that country, reflected everywhere by water, could rescue her from that bag: R. loomed before it all—a heavy, dark mass without air holes.

One morning, having climbed out of bed before dawn and smoked a cigarette, on an empty stomach, by the window open to the gentle glimmer of the wet, scaly tiled roofs in the fog, she realized very clearly that she needed to excise this man from her life immediately—like a rotten tooth or a malignant tumor. R. was simply emotionally obtuse—packed hard inside, like dry ground. You can’t tell such things by sight; they only really come to light in bed. This must be the fate of many of the nouveau riche, and generally anyone who spends too much time with the same kind of pressure applied on the same, very narrow range of emotions: it’s as if parts of their soul atrophy. Life had pressed R. into a total spiritual impermeability, a chronic constipation of sorts—and she, Daryna, was his laxative.

He needed her because he needed the aerating, the breaking and turning of his petrified soil, both in sex and in his everyday life: that’s what casinos were for and racing his car, cutting lanes on the Zhytomir highway, and saunas with masseuses and sex-tourism to Thailand and a whole repertoire of other aids, all at the client’s disposal, that could stimulate the emotional peristalsis—having acquired estates, people now spend them on anything that makes them feel alive. She was for R. just such an aid, and that’s what she felt herself to be, after all their mechanical orgasms, she felt it in her ass, like she’d been screwed there.

This was, give or take, what she yelled at him in the end in the middle of the street, seeing nothing around her, and she knew she hit the bull’s-eye, that he’d disappear after that, excise himself from her life like a cankered growth—men like him did not go back to the site of their defeat. The thing is, though, that they don’t ever forgive those who were there to witness it.

And this was the fact she had overlooked: R. wasn’t simply her past, wasn’t simply a lover she’d left—much more brutally than she would’ve preferred. (She couldn’t stand violent breakups with sordid scenes and did, in fact, nurse at the bottom of her heart that idiotic notion of all her men somehow constituting something like a single extended family—she was, for instance, frightfully pleased to introduce Aidy to Sergiy and watch them shake hands; she loved them both at that moment.) He wasn’t someone with whom you could part and not see again for years in a city of three million, where you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a banker, or a journalist, for that matter (and they didn’t, fortunately, all frequent the same watering holes); R. was her enemy.

And he took his revenge in the simplest way available: first by giving the channel money and then by cutting it off; goodbye, we regret to inform you that our priorities have changed. Read: If I can no longer fuck your anchor, I’ll fuck you. Did he think that perhaps the channel’s bosses would then deliver her to his doorstep rolled up into a rug like an Oriental slave girl, and he’d be able to walk all over her in some uber-cynical manner? No, that’s unlikely—it was probably just his good business sense at work: What’s the point of paying if you don’t get anything in return? Simple as that, and no need to, as Antosha (or Occam’s Razor) says, multiply redundant essences.

“And don’t you pretend,” the boss hollered—much more confident now that he’d spotted her confusion, with decidedly more spiteful indignation—“don’t you even try to pretend like you didn’t know anything!”

But she did not; she knew nothing—that was the rub; there were lots of things she didn’t know and wished to continue not knowing: she shut her eyes and pinched her nose, just like everyone else. Silly little Daryna, little Red Riding Hood, climbing into bed to play with the wolf thinking him her grandma. There’s your sex with King Kong.

Out loud she laughed at him—because what else could she do—eww, how disgusting! The primitive, dumb as a tank, logical force of this whole edifice crushed her; how easily these two, the boss and R., had robbed her of her private life behind her back—what she used to consider her private life (as she said to R., oh so lightly: I sleep with whomever I please—and he did warn her, didn’t he—don’t be so sure)—converting it into dollars and cents, like they’d translated her into a hard, solid language they could understand. Knocked off her accuser’s high ground, she finally saw the anchorwoman Goshchynska through their eyes: an expensive woman, to be sure (and with a price tag attached!), what a bitch, a sexy cunt, a walking ad for contact lenses—I use them and toss them without regret. (What if that’s what R. thought—that she’d used him to get money for the channel?) “Unshakeoffable” as the boss had once complimented her comically, not knowing how to say “irresistable” in Ukrainian, and thus capable of being useful on screen: braids, a little top, welcome to our whorehouse; that was how they saw her, and that was the version they admired—that was the version they were willing to pay for, even to “take her in on the profits,” whether from the election carousel or the slave trade, whatever’s in season.

They saw her as one of them, and she had nothing with which to shield herself. Her work, all her professional accomplishments by themselves meant nothing to them but instead lay beyond the reach of their assessment scale, in the “blind spot.” They were just fun and games on the margins of the big business—aspirations for television with an intellectual gloss, celebration of heroes no one’s ever heard of—well, that’s nice, fit for an international contest somewhere, where it can fetch an award to hang under glass on the wall in the boss’s office, but essentially no one gives a flying fuck.

R., when she talked about her work (told him about her heroes, the idiot!), would smile a Buddha smile and say that her enthusiasm made him insanely horny (and would pull her hand into his pants, so she could see for herself). The same effect was produced in him by the enthusiasm with which she sucked delicious shreds of lobster flesh out of the shell in the little Dutch restaurant: an erection was another hard (doesn’t get much harder) language, tangible like money, into which they translated what they didn’t understand. And she had nothing else to show them as proof of her identity; she worked with them, she lived on the money they paid her, even—and she couldn’t strike this from her résumé either—occasionally slept with them (a woman’s curiosity can lead all kinds of places!). She was inside the system and felt quite at home there. Had she told her boss that after seven years on air she still felt the darkness in the studio of an audience extending to infinity on the other side of the screen—full of people to whom she was accountable, could even feel their breath—this confession, most likely, wouldn’t elicit even an erection from him: he’d just laugh and counsel her to spend more time outdoors. He had also become a different biological species—she’d been refusing to see it for too long.

It occurred to her that he really wanted her to stay with the channel. He wanted her to be the way they saw her; he was willing to fight for that. Not just for the profits, or for the “face of the channel.” This mattered to him: that they become equals, two of a kind, professionals, and he no less (better even—because he’s the one paid more) than she—to erase between them any gap that could not be translated into clear, hard language. The gap irked him.

And, exactly as with R., only without the screaming (on the contrary, dreadfully slowly and quietly because rage was choking her and made it hard for her to speak, even the room grew darker around her, as if dusk fell suddenly), she said things to him that she hadn’t intended to say and that would’ve probably been better left unsaid, because it’s not wise to be so old-fashioned as to declare war—like Prince Oleg to the Khazars—right in the face of the person you intend to war with (she knew she would do everything imaginable to kill their dastardly show). But, just as with R., telling the truth to the eyes of the person facing her was, in that moment, the only thing she could do to separate, to shield herself from their sticky grasp, like lowering the manhole cover on the cloacae below.

“Do you realize,” she said to the boss, “that you’re contagious? You’re like the guy with TB who goes around spitting into other people’s soup. Like in vampire movies: you’ve been bitten, and now you must bite everyone else so they become like you. And that sucks, brother. Big time.”

Amazingly enough, he kept silent. Then muttered in Russian, obviously working over something in his mind, “You’re insane.”

“Aha,” she said, rising to go, straightening to her full height in front of him on her high heels (he was short, a small man with a Napoleon complex), stepping like a hot-blooded racehorse—unshakeoffable. “That’s right, insane. It runs in the family, don’t you know?”

She only tells her mother the triumphant part, in an edited version, without too many details. Olga Fedorivna suddenly chimes in. She remembers that fifteen-year-old film that propelled the boss into big journalism—sure, sure, it was on TV—children in Chernivtsi struck down by a mysterious illness, terrible shots: a hospital room full of little girls and all of them bald as old men. You bet, a picture like that stays with you: science fiction, banshee purgatory. The kids would wake up one morning, get out of bed, and all their hair would stay on the pillow. Soft baby hair, a tiny silky scalp.

“That was right after Chernobyl, wasn’t it,” says Olga Fedorivna, delighting in her good memory.

“No, Mom, that was later. And it’s got nothing to do with Chernobyl.”

A typical merging effect: the greater horror subsumes the smaller one. Chernobyl, Chernivtsi—they even sound similar, both start with Ch, easy to mix them up. Mix them up and then forget. Do they teach this in the Journalism Institute now: How to present information in the manner that makes it easiest to forget? And then paste over the poignant image in people’s minds with something from Star Wars—plenty of bald-headed little monsters in that story, all over the place really.

Boss had made his name with that horror clip about bald children, but no one remembers this fact anymore, and he himself never brings up his early days. Another man died then, his body the roadblock to any further independent investigations. Another man paid for the boss’s career.

But she didn’t even remember this, wasn’t thinking about that story at all during their conversation! The precision of her aim was something akin to what a body does in a moment of danger, when it knows which way to duck, all by itself. You just poke with your finger, not looking—and lose the whole arm to the gooey mess with the requisite dose of someone’s blood in it.

That time in Chernivtsi, Daryna explains to her mother, it was, presumably, an accident at a military plant to which the authorities never granted access. Moscow managed to close the case just before the Union fell apart. A rocket fuel spill, most likely. Who knows whose security services were involved—Moscow’s or ours—the fact remains that someone badly needed to have the whole story hushed up, whatever it took.

“So what you are saying,” Mom says, straining to digest the information, “is that the gentleman who was investigating the case was, in fact, murdered? And that your producer knew about it—and kept quiet?”

Why is it, exactly, that she finds this so hard to believe? Daryna feels something like her old filial exasperation.

“Mom, you’re like from Mars, or Venus, or something! What, Father’s colleagues didn’t quietly make their careers on someone else’s blood? When they’d driven the architect to killing himself—and then made him the scapegoat—and they all, except Father, signed the denunciation like good boys.” Now, wouldn’t it be interesting, flashes through her mind, to meet with those people now, whoever’s still alive, and see who they’d become. Do they also moonlight in human trafficking when business is slow? And while we’re at it, let’s see how their kids turned out, an instructive little show indeed—and suddenly she sees what she could’ve done with her father’s plot in which she could never find the story. Now, when she can’t make anything, barn door closed and no horse in sight, as Aidy says. “You’ve lived your life with all that, and now you’re surprised?”

“Yes, but that was then!” Olga Fedorivna protests. “Times have changed!”

It’s like generational egoism in reverse. Everything bad has already happened to us, and our children start from a clean slate. And the children cheerfully trot off into the world convinced that that’s exactly how things’ll turn out, and the parents egg them on: go on, kiddo, we’ve done our time, but you’ll have the good life now—lots and lots of it, all you want. And the kids, aside from this blessing, are armed with nothing, go bare as a bone. Stripped naked, that’s the thing.

“We all thought so too, Ma.”

If only one could know where “then” ends and where “now” begins. And how stubbornly blind this self-preserving human faith is—the faith that a clear watershed divides them. That it’s enough to turn the page—start a new calendar; change your name, passport, seal, and flag; meet and fall in love with a new man; forget everything that had once been and never (even alone with yourself) remember the dead—and the past will be made null and void. But there is no watershed, and the past pushes at you from every pore and crack, mixing with the present into dense inseparable dough—and you have very little chance of flailing your way out of it. Only we keep on consoling ourselves with our childish illusion that we can control the past because we can forget it. As if our forgetting would make it vanish, go away. Like Irka Mocherniuk’s rug rat when he got angry at her for slapping him and threatened, “I’m gonna make it all dalk for you now!” squeezing his eyes shut as hard as he could.

Still, Mom can be forgiven, Daryna thinks—she did spend her working life in a museum, after all, got used to a cataloged kind of past, ordered and pinned to the corresponding dates, like a collection of dead butterflies: here’s “then,” and beginning from this point it is “now,” all nice and tidy. When Daryna was little, she loved visiting her mother at work. Back then, all the exhibits in the museum’s halls were above her head, glassy glimmers up there, mysterious and unattainable, and one of the adults would always pick her up so she could peek at the pictures under the glass—there were many, immeasurably more than in any book, she couldn’t dream of getting a good long look at all of them, and the incredible riches the adults possessed made her swoon delightfully—and that’s what it meant to be an adult: to have access to all the pictures in the world, like Ali Baba’s treasure caves, and she wished to grow up sooner, faster. And, well, it all came true just the way she wished, didn’t it? Of all things, she’s always had plenty of pictures.

And again, a wave of scorching pain swallows her, so hot she has to bite into her lip so as not to moan out loud: rot it all to pieces; she really was good at television! What happened, that it was no longer important—being good? Young journalists don’t even use this word anymore; they don’t say that someone is good at what he or she does; they say successful. A thief—if he has millions in offshore accounts—is a successful entrepreneur; a hopeless talentless putz—if his face is on every channel—is a successful journalist. And it’s us they learn from, Daryna thinks dully. Boss talks like that too, and not just about shows, but about people too. And he also says professional—that’s the highest compliment from him. Alright, let’s say so-and-so is a professional—and what about everyone else? Who are they? Amateurs? Then why the hell do they still have their jobs?

They had been a team once—when was that? So long ago. That was her real youth, first and foremost because of its sense of unlimited possibility: the wild nineties, free-sailing—just show initiative and money took care of itself; suburban mansions popped up and burst as merrily as bubbles on the puddles under a spring downpour, but the air was thick with ideas, the air swirled and roiled with them! In their old studio, their very first one, set up in a rented factory warehouse (the factory had shut down, let them have the space for a song), they’d pull up their chairs and sit up into the wee hours of the night, drafting the program grid, arguing and yelling at each other; the crumpled stubs of unfinished cigarettes spilled from overflowing ashtrays onto the table, and when the smoke got so bad their eyes watered, someone, most often Vasyl’ko in his nerdy bug-eyed, fogged-over glasses, would finally get up to open the window, throwing a jacket over her shoulders on his way back. Where are you now, Vasyl’ko? On what meager Canadian pasture do you nibble your bitter grass?

Last she heard from him was an e-card sent in late 2002, from some total armpit, Manitoba, where in winter the temperatures fall, like in Siberia, to twenty below, and the air’s so dry your lips crack to blood. What the hell was he doing there, in that desert? What was he wasting his life on? He was a natural—no one could draw people out like he did—he’d talk to a post and have it spilling its guts before you knew it. He had that effect on everyone, even the president, or, actually, back then just a candidate. (A remarkable show it was: that redneck never caught on that he was being stripped to his dirty laundry in view of the entire country and went all soft, started bragging about his poor postwar childhood and how back in ’55, dressed in his only threadbare suit coat from his native village, he rode in a coal car to take the institute entrance exams because he had no money to pay for a passenger ticket—and he shone, glowed with the sated pride of the victor who can now show the world a whole warehouse of suits in place of that old coat he’d ruined, and fine suits indeed!)

Vasyl’ko was the first to locate this little spring that powered, as it eventually turned out, the whole wind-up mechanism of our so-called elites—their deep, lusty thirst for revenge for all those Soviet-time humiliations, and to hell with the cost: back then, in the nineties, no one could yet see that the only thing these people desired, as they took their seats in our TV sets with an increasing sense of entitlement, was to climb Kyiv’s hills (knocking a few floors off the old buildings—so they don’t block their view of St. Sophia) and throw, right there on Yaroslav’s grave, the triumphant feast of new nomads. Vasyl’ko wasn’t after some deep social analysis, and never forced any conclusions upon his audiences—he just knew how to listen; really, it couldn’t be simpler; how to listen to what people were telling him and hear the incredible volumes they said about themselves, without noticing, when someone listened to them the way Vasyl’ko did. He could repeat any conversation, even one overheard by chance, almost word for word, and now everyone’s just yakking away over each other’s heads and nobody hears anybody.

The new crop—they’re totally checked out, blank, like they were born with the earbuds in. Nastya the intern, while her guest is talking, keeps herself entertained by rehearsing the different angles of her supermodel smile, waiting for him to finish until it’s her turn to voice the next question. While Vasyl’ko, a communication genius, who even in a ninety-second vox pop could present any random passerby as a one-in-a-million precious soul, is observing Canadian sparrows through his binoculars somewhere at the end of the world. That e-card he sent sported a bright-yellow-chested creature with a tuxedo-black tail, and Vasyl’ko wrote that it was a new hobby of his: bird-watching. Bird frigging watching.

And such stories were myriad; they were legion; they were everywhere you looked. People emigrated, disappeared, dropped off the radar; old phone numbers when she called, thinking—he’s the one I’d love to bring in for the new show!—were answered by strange voices. No, so-and-so had sold the apartment, and didn’t leave a forwarding address—as if an invisible tornado swept through their ranks, leaving only a few of them who had once been called the first echelon of the Ukrainian journalism, those who still remembered Vadyk Boiko and the first show he wrote and hosted on the only Ukrainian channel that was on the air back then. The whole country watched it, streets on his nights empty like after a flood, and then one winter day in 1992, Vadyk, very happy, bragged to a colleague about a pouch of papers he was about to publicize: “I’ve got ’em Commies right here. I’m gonna drop a bomb on them!” And forty minutes later a bomb exploded in his apartment, where they later found his burned-alive body plastered to the floor. The authorities announced a few theories that all boiled down to the victim having burned all by himself, and without anyone’s help whatsoever; they closed the case, and no one would bring up Vadym Boiko’s name on the air after that, as if he’d never existed.

Maybe if we had spent the rest of the nineties speaking and shouting about him, if we had kept reminding each other about him, if we’d gathered for an annual wake and aired it live every winter, all for one, in solidarity, on every channel while that was still possible, maybe then it would’ve taken them longer to take care of us? And the thing is, we all went so quietly, without a peep or a fight, and the Gongadze case doesn’t count: by the time Giya’s head (literally) rolled at the close of our wild nineties, the bitter and magnificent age of aspiration and hope, of skyrocketing careers and buried projects, of daily self-congratulatory banquets where we went to graze with a laugh at first—here, give me today’s wire; let’s see who’s got a release for dinner tonight—and later more and more selectively—ugh, I won’t go there, those bastards never have booze (The boozeless bastards were the last surviving holdouts of the Helsinki group who were still talking, mostly to themselves, about the lustration problem, but who cared about them anymore?)—by that time, although we still picked and chose our clients and put on superior airs negotiating the price of whitewashing some rotten company’s reputation, we were already tame as guinea pigs—we’d gotten used to beer at Eric’s, and jazz jams at 44, to flying to Antalya and Hurghada on vacation. We had already partaken of designer boutiques and our first discount cards. We were well-fed, well-groomed guinea pigs, with glossy fur—those of us who managed to find our way to the flood of money currents—we had no instinct for danger, and that, perhaps, was the main mark of our generation: bare as bones, armed with nothing but our parents’ blessing of go-ahead-kiddo-and-you’ll-have-the-good-life, we stuck our heads into the trap happily and with an easy heart, even with a sense of our own relevance; we took pride in our glossy furs, in being paid, and being paid well—for being talented and insightful, of course, what else?—and then it was too late. We went along, thinking, in our naïveté, that we were shaping the new television landscape—we measured our ratings, thought up new shows, and, like children, felt unbelievably cool when we said “in Ukrainian here for the first time”—and what we really did was dance on blood, and that unavenged, unreprised blood ate at us from inside, insidious as lead-laced water.

“What came of us, oh, what came of us?” squealed Irochka Bilozir on every channel—another burnt-out star of the nineties, relegated soon after to the faceless infantry ranks of synthetic Russian pop; her helpless squealing, as it later turned out, was the true chorus of that era, only no one heard it when they should have been listening: Something wrong was really “coming” of us, but so inconspicuously, day by day, drop by drop, how could anyone notice?

People were changing—they didn’t just drop off the radar, out of the country, out of the profession, lost to the margins, to the Internet, to small-town newspapers that no one ever reads, to radio frequencies barely buzzing along on foreign grants and dying almost before you could find them on the dial—even those who stayed on the radar were no longer the same. Something broke in them, their internal resistance disappeared: where you could, not so long ago, a mere two, three, five years ago, find a solid, good shoulder to lean on, things suddenly slipped and lost shape—softly, viscously, with eyes shifting and hiding in the hangover swell of the eyelids. “For free, Daryna, only your mom kisses you; let’s make a deal: you show me what you’ve got and I’ll show you mine”—and the especially principled editors put five-fold markup on the especially libelous dirt on their own pals and would not budge a cent, all in the name of their sacred friendship. “Don’t take it personally, bro,” they’d say afterward to the victim, “how’d it be if we ran an interview with you?”—and the victims agreed.

The multiplying personnel gaps were then filled, like a karst cave with water, with the watery-green teenagers, who had absolutely no clue, wanted to know even less, and were only too eager to take on the most blatantly partisan political product. Oil barons enthroned their mistresses in the so-called Lifestyle Interest sector, morality and culture included, and the hordes of serf souls delivered the shows for their silicone-lipped, porn-shells turnkey, so all the ladies had to do was roll in and read prepared text at the camera. And the same guys who once, in the early nineties, broke their backs to raise, like proverbial barns, the most resonant media projects (which later sank, quietly, noiselessly, into the pile of rubbish, and smashed crippled shadows crawled out from under the ruins for a long time afterward, limping to reception buffets where they could eat for two days in advance), the guys who in 1990 lugged bundles of the first independent Ukrainian newspapers from Lithuanian printers and took the police clubs to the kidneys for their efforts—these same guys, saddled with premature beer bellies and bald spots, went to earn their living as whipping boys for parliamentarians—as press secretaries to various political roughnecks who were liable to bid them fetch their mineral water in thunderously unprintable language right in front of the press corps. And the whipping boys quickly learned to affect permanent holy-fool grins that were supposed to evince their complete philosophical invincibility against the whole vanity of vanities of this world, full-contact Buddhism as Antosha used to say, listening askance, like whores to an inappropriately chatty client, whenever Goshchynska got on her soapbox about her heroes—as if calculating, in their minds, what kind of money was paid for the box, and how much of it they could hope to snatch for themselves.

At some point all professional topics just expired, suddenly and at once; people stopped talking seriously about what they did, because no one did anything seriously anymore except make money. At some point—What did it look like? When did it come?—very suddenly, they all stopped caring, as if the once-released virus of the latent disease that had been eating away at them from inside finally did its job, and the only thing left to do was to record the rigor mortis. And not even rigor but a viscous, boggy mass that sucked you in everywhere you turned, and the sense at yet another dinner that the people mobbing the tables with their plates and glasses, slurping in unison, clattering tablewares and getting instantly drunk (many never sobering up again) were not living and—no sense denying—yet rather successful in this life, these corpses, decomposed into the already-runny, porridge-like consistency: reach out to touch them with your hand and the goo would swallow your whole arm. This vision came to Daryna more than once or twice—a hot, scorching thrust at the nape, the cerebellum, like a blast from a champagne cork (or a gunshot—straight at the nape, into the pituitary, muzzle pressed into the hollow between the hemispheres).

Once, soon after Vlada’s funeral, it came again—at a restaurant, at some celebratory occasion, at the point when the tables are stripped down to the soiled dinnerware, sweating waiters stumble splashing dessert onto the parquet floors, and the conversations lose coherence, scattering into a chaos of solo monologues, a lady of Balzacian age resolved to speak about Vlada and kept squawking, peacock-like, like whizzing a saw through a log, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t believe that she is dead!” And one of the men, totally wasted, grunted peaceably back at her, a deep echo rung from a bell, “Who of us is alive?” Daryna remembered the cold shiver and, at the same time, the scorch of fire that burst into her nape like a bullet, and instantly sobered her up. Pushed her, like a cork, to the surface of the general chaotic noise, as if lifting her up to the ceiling from where, as she looked disengaged at the stirred-up maelstrom of people and leftovers, she thought with superstitious horror that it’s true; he’s right—there are no living souls here—this is the underworld.

Vlada—how did she know this? And this angle, this point of view from the ceiling? She had a painting, in the Secrets cycle, titled After the Blast. It was a view from above, and in the middle, a splattered circle of light like a multistrand crystal chandelier spun fast on its hook, shattered into animation-sliced circles like ripples spreading on water. Vlada was always fighting stasis; she used to say the Old Masters’ work already contained both animation and cinematography, and, in comparison to them, we gained in technique and lost in imagination: we’ve grown lazy and forgotten that one can communicate everything, absolutely everything by painterly means alone, even sound, as Picasso did in Guernica, the noise of the air raid brought across with dimmed lights and swinging lightbulbs. And that’s what Vlada also achieved to a degree in this painting: Her blazing circle of light was like a multilayered wheel knocked off the chariot of the terrible Advertisement God, spun with raging, blend-into-a-single-blot speed; and beneath, a field the color of rot was peppered with a dense black confetti of tiny human shapes like remnants of a defeated army—each with a logoed shopping bag (the bags were shrunken photographs glued onto the canvas). Hugo Boss, MaxMara, Steilmann, Brioni—a brand-name spill.

The critics commented acerbically that Matusevych painted “an explosion at a shopping mall” and should demand remuneration from all those brands for advertising them. But in fact she had painted a war—the one we were losing every day, without ever knowing it, as we sped, helter-skelter, across that rusty rotting field. And as it turned out, it was only our bodies that kept moving. We were running in the underworld. We’d been blown to smithereens somewhere along the way. We didn’t know there were mines, no one had told us: we kept running, panting, clutching our brand names to our chests, our apartments, our cell phones and automobiles—and still thought we were alive, because no one had told us we were already dead.

“Too many deaths,” Vlada had said in Daryna’s dream—and really, it’s like someone had knocked the bottom off the fairytale barrel, and a legion of deaths had broken free. Something happened to death itself at the century’s turn, a transformation that had gone unnoticed for too long: like a new note from the orchestra that at first seems an accidental false noise and then grows to redefine the whole symphony, a new form of death swelled and took root—death without cause. Up until then it was commonly believed that people died of illness, of old age, in accidents, or at someone’s hand—that a matter as grave as the cutting short of a life must always have cause and death had been quite accommodating, finding new pretexts for itself every time. But at the turn of the century it suddenly quit playing by the rules, lost its mind, and among the old, still comprehensible deaths squatted with growing impunity this new death—a death deranged.

Young men were killed in their sleep by their hearts, which had never ached and then suddenly stopped; young women drowned silently in shallow bathtubs, under the shrouds of still-warm bubbles; a person tripped, fell on a sidewalk—and did not get up again. As if all it took were a single casual breath, a single careless tap of death’s fingers—and several lively, busy little shapes with logoed bags in their hands fell with phantom ease, like in a computer game. People did not notice that they ceased being shocked by the news of a classmate one hadn’t seen for several years no longer alive, a colleague one could finally pay back for that old loan long been buried. “Darn!” Yurko once griped. “He’d promised a tutor for my kid!” Death stopped being an event—people reacted the same as if the deceased had moved out of the country, making sure to erase the old addresses from their contact lists; death no longer demanded an explanation. Somehow, all at once, the tethers that held one to life grew loose—rotten threads that could pull apart any moment. As if in all the crowds that flowed through the streets, that flooded offices and cafés, supermarkets and stadiums, airports and subways, there was no longer, in all those people together, enough total life to require any kind of effort to pry a physically healthy person out of it. On the contrary, it took an effort to hang on to life. And to remain alive was a feat achieved by only a few.

You prepared us for nothing! Daryna wants to yell at her mother. You, the slave generation, submissive daydreamers with eyes wide open—what did you give us? What the hell is it good for, all your survival experience, your lifelong struggle in lines for a piece of meat, for imported boots and an efficiency flat with a separate room for your children, if the only thing with which you managed to arm us is your faith that the page had been turned—stomped out, forgotten, and now your children will have the good life, because we can earn as much as we want wherever we want, and no one will start a KGB file on any of us just for speaking Ukrainian? You couldn’t imagine a better world and so obediently buried your dead for it, without a shred of dignity, except maybe the tears you swallowed somewhere in a dark corner at night, and you did not even teach us to take pride in our dead—you silently acquiesced to the very thing that was demanded of you: to admit that they lost because they perished, and the winners were the ones who had stayed alive, with apartments, dachas, and Sochi—the successful ones, as we say, we who’d gotten this virus from you—to despise those who’d been left behind. You gave us nothing else, nothing at all, nothing but the pride in our own bank accounts and our own faces on TV—you launched us into life, light as puffballs, and we blackened and burst as soon as our youthful vigor began to flag; you loaded us with emptiness, and now we’re passing it on to the next generation.

All this could have been screamed blindly, with the inspiration of hatred that, once ruptured, shoots far in every direction, like an abscess that’d been swelling with pus for years: It’s you, you; it’s all your fault! And what a relief that would have been—to find, finally, an entity of which one could demand the account! But Daryna is silent. She resists the urge to leap upon this slippery surface and speed along with a surfer’s breathtaking ease—dear Lord, how many times has she witnessed scenes just like that between mothers and daughters? What terrible things were confided to her by the same old Irka Mocherniuk, who always said that her mother had castrated her father, and had screamed at her mother, at the peak of her own marital problems, that their entire generation should’ve been sterilized like they did in China so they wouldn’t have had any children? And Irka’s mother called Daryna and cried on the phone telling her all this, begging her to “influence” her Irochka, as if Daryna and Irochka still went to school together and sat at one desk. But Daryna herself is resolutely incapable of forcing anything like that out of her throat: it gets stuck. Unlike her friends, she no longer feels entitled to judge as she had when she was nineteen. And not because it’s been twenty years since then—there are no statutes of limitations between parents and children. It’s because, in her case—as she realizes very clearly—it would be unfair to judge her parents: they did give her something.

She is lucky: she is “insane,” and it’s hereditary.

She really had no inkling, before yesterday, of how powerful the instinct of resistance to evil would prove to be in her—more powerful than any desire or longing, than any possible temptation. And it wouldn’t have been this strong if her father hadn’t died because of it. And if her mother hadn’t approved of his choice.

Incredible, but that’s how it was.

Daryna feels a new, detached kind of respect, as if they were strangers, for this couple, Olya and Tolya. Otollya. Erased, shattered, destroyed—like the fairytale palace clad in gentle dove-gray shades of the interior, adorned by ornate shadows, the parquetry, the lamps…. Everything’s gone, nothing remains—nothing you can touch, show on TV, price out in hard currency. Utterly incomprehensible how this force could have passed into her. They didn’t even tell her anything explicitly when she was little, her parents; they didn’t exhort or admonish, just as all her classmates’ parents rarely dared confide to their children anything that did not fit with the commonly accepted modus vivendi. (Irka was only told in 1990 that her grandfather actually died in the Gulag and not at the front; and Vlada remembered, not without irony, how Matusevych Senior very secretly whispered to her, in the eighth grade sometime, that he was actually for socialism, but without Russia, but she had to keep mum about it, or else—this was enough to pack you off to the camps, people got seven years for less!) Daryna’s parents were no dissidents by any stretch either, and no textbooks would ever mention their names. They merely had the strength to do what they thought was right—and take the full measure of what one had to take in that country in return for doing so, death included.

And somehow (How?) this strength of theirs—the one that seemed so wasted because it hadn’t translated into anything tangible—turned out great enough to confer upon their child her own margin of safety. So that in a different era, in a different country, packed with deaths like a can with sardines this child would remain alive.

That much was true: she was alive, and no one could take it away from her.

What was it Grandpa Nietzsche said? What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger? Okay, maybe not everything. But sometimes, the thing that does kill us makes our children stronger.

Still, she never wanted to have children of her own.

And that’s when she suddenly remembers—all but slaps herself on the forehead, a habit of Aidy’s she’s adopted—breaking the flow of her mother’s consolatory monologue (which she hadn’t been listening to anyway, tuned it out, something about how “now” is not the same as “then,” and that things have a way of figuring themselves out). She remembers from whose lips she recently, this fall, heard that abrading, inappropriately official Anatoliivna. Amazing, actually, that she’d forgotten to ask her mom, totally crossed her out of that story with the Security Bureau archives where Aidy had gone a few more times, and all for naught: they kept saying they couldn’t locate Great-Aunt Gela’s case, and now what, no more movies for her, so what’s the point anyway? She remembers clearly, painfully, as if from a previous life, the sun-drenched corner of Zolotovoritska and Reitarska, their first assault on the newly built archives, her own single-minded focus on her quest and feels astounded by how happy she had been so recently—and how many unnoticed details she let scatter away from her sight in her happy single-mindedness, like pebbles from under the hooves of a racehorse barreling around the track—but there it is, the tiny rock, wedged into the cracked hoof, never would’ve thought of it if they hadn’t reined her in.

“I’m sorry, Mom, can I interrupt you?”

Olga Fedorivna obediently stops talking.

“I keep forgetting to ask you about this one thing. Does the name Boozerov mean anything to you?”

Silence.

“Mom? Hello? Can you hear me?”

Did they get disconnected or something?

“Boozerov?” Mom finally responds—in a very surprised, young alto, the voice that had once belonged to a brunette in a bright-yellow dress. “That was our curator’s name. How do you know him?”

“What curator?” Daryna thinks she must’ve missed something: The job didn’t exist back in Mom’s day, did it? What was there to curate if there weren’t any independent art shows or private galleries, none of it?

“The KGB curator, who else? Every Soviet institution had its own KGB curator, it was a special job they had.”

“Oh.”

So in some way times have changed a little—if the meaning of the word has changed.

“Boozerov, what do you know,” Mom mutters. “What was his name? Gimme a second, I’ll remember…”

“Not Pavlo Ivanovych by chance?”

“That’s it! Pavlo Ivanovych, Pashenka we called him. He was young, younger than me, he couldn’t have been thirty then; he was born after the war already…. Such a hottie!” Mom’s voice takes on a refreshed but clearly vintage tart disapproval as if being a “hottie” was an aggravating circumstance for a GB man. “He had that dark complexion, you know, and those big eyes like olives…. He should’ve gone into movies instead of the KGB; he looked like Omar Sharif. How do you know him?”

“Met him at the Security Bureau’s archives, when we went looking for Adrian’s great-aunt’s case. He’s still got those eyes—like an Arabian stallion’s. He sends his regards.”

“Fancy that, he hasn’t forgotten me!” Olga Fedorivna marvels tartly again. “So he’s at the archives now? No more tracking people for him?” She’s regained her composure already, like she’s fixed up, with both hands, her still-lush hair, fluffing it up with her fingers—a mannerism of hers, and Daryna can almost see her do it at this instant. “He used to have these long interviews with me, back before they took your father in for the psychiatric assessment—wanted me to, you know, influence your father. Latched on to me like a leech. We had a small staff at the museum, nothing really for a curator to do, so he worked me to pieces trying to earn his star.

“Once, I remember, I got really pissed at him; I was at the end of my rope already. What’s the point of your meetings? I asked him. What do you want from me? It’s not enough that you ran my husband to the ground; now because of you my boss is giving me three kinds of hell—our directress then, we used to call her Ilse Koch among ourselves, was on a tear, ran my life like in a concentration camp: anytime I all but dashed out for ten minutes to buy a pretzel on the corner, I had to write an explanatory report! I just couldn’t do right by her. She wanted me out of there—must’ve freaked at a black sheep in her flock. Well, he sort of looked a bit ashamed then. Swore he thought very highly of me, and wrote a very good report about me. And maybe he wasn’t lying, because just after that the directress relaxed a little, left me alone. And he disappeared after that—they transferred him somewhere and I heard our museum had a different curator, but he never contacted me and I didn’t see him. I figured our Pashenka made a slip somewhere, because he was all sort of droopy and mopey in those last days. Said to me then that he wished he had a wife who’d stand up for him like I did for Tolya.”

In her mother’s voice, as if plumped up from inside, Daryna clearly hears notes of pride. Perhaps, she thinks, that’s what kept her going all that time when she was alone? The sign, sent to her through Pavlo Ivanovych, that she was also doing everything right?

“Whatever did they want from you? They only wanted to pin mismanagement on him, not subterfuge.”

“Like you could ever tell with them, Daryna! They just had to get into everything, and spoil it all. Kept asking me if my husband had an irritable temper—he must’ve been collecting material for their psychiatrists, but I didn’t think of that until later… and wanted me to make Father take back all his petitions. ‘Don’t you want to live in peace?’ he asked. I told him of course I do, but I also want to respect my husband, and my husband would never agree to such abomination—libel an innocent person, and posthumously! I remember he blinked at me in this stunned way and said, ‘So that’s the kind of woman you are!’ I wondered, a little,” Mom adds sheepishly, “if he’d taken a bit of a shine to me.”

“Hey, that’s violation of procedure! The valiant Soviet CheKa men were strictly prohibited from having any sentiments toward their charges. There were special instructions about that, I’ve read those.”

“Your matinka still alive?”—“And well, thank you, and yours?” Daryna feels herself blush at this memory, the way she snorted, snapped, stomped her foot like a little Billy Goat Gruff. And what do you know, Pavlo Ivanovych is basically family! Somewhere in the same archive where Olena Dovganivna’s case is buried, sit Pavlo Ivanovych’s reports about Goshchynska, Olga Fedorivna, year of birth 1939, Ukrainian, unaffiliated, married, husband—no, that’s no longer relevant, it’s best to skip that field.

“A pleasure to know that she’s raised such a famous daughter”—with the Russian stress. Because what—she might not have raised one? The retired terrorist, doe-eyed Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov with his substantial behind and liver crusts in the corners of his mouth, loving father of a Conservatory student wrote, thirty years ago, when he didn’t yet have those crusts and was making his career in the so-called field operations, a good report about her mother. Are we to understand that if he had written a bad one, Mom would’ve been, just like Dad, thrown out on the street, or, worse, would’ve gotten a prison sentence? And what would’ve happened then to her? God knows, but nothing good, that’s for sure—political prisoners’ children didn’t even get access to higher education until after the Soviet Union collapsed. She’d have landed in some horrible children’s home, most likely. Or maybe Aunt Lyusya would’ve stepped in, taken her to live with her in Poltavshchyna? Even then, her chances of growing up to be famous would’ve been zero; that’s probably why he said what he did. She’s not going to stay famous for long, though, and, generally speaking, it is not at all clear what she’s supposed to do with herself from now on—but that’s not Pavlo Ivanovych’s fault.

And at once she’s overtaken again by that same, vestibular-like, short-circuit dizziness that happened to her once before, in the spring, the day she stayed late at the studio watching her interview with Vlada and Adrian called to tell her about his dream. For a fraction of a second—this can’t last longer, a living human being can’t take this for much longer—she is carried upwards by the speeding elevator or a giant Ferris wheel—not above space as in Vlada’s painting, but above time, above yesterday’s office with the boss’s gesticulating little shape inside it, and reflected from it, in direct retreating perspective, the other, 1987 office with fake, leather-padded doors, above the wet highlights of the Dutch tile roofs behind the hotel window, and still further, through an enfilade of rooms opening into each other, where a seventies’ kitchen boils with the pot of bubble-swelling laundry on the stove and the puddle that had been the snowman spreads on the rust-colored painted plank floor, and her young father stands on the landing with his head tossed back; from above, in bird’s-eye view, for a slipping tail of an instant, she sees it all pulse together, set into motion like cracked-off hummocks in the world ocean, plugged into some giant, boundless power field, and sees the thin—flickering and countless—dazzling threads running through it all, piercing her life—and stretching beyond it, beyond the horizon of the visible to compose a deliberate, no, deliberating, living design, Dovganivna—Adrian—Boozerov—Mom—herself—Vlada—R.—boss—captain…. Another moment, whose very imminence fills her with knee-buckling awe, and it seems they all, living and dead, will push their times together like chairs to a table, will take their places in the plugged-in map of the stars and everything will become clear—what, everything?—but nothing.

The moment passes, the whole picture, without ever having come together, scatters into pieces, into flat shards of memories with which you could never erect the Tower of Babel, and Daryna is left sitting on her messy, crumpled bed, blinking at the curtain brightened by the sunlight to egg-yolk yellow with the shadow of the window frame on it like a cross distorted in a magnifying glass…. Threads, her mind turns over belated like a hard, sticky piece of candy that won’t crack. Threads, thready threads. Mom—herself—Boozerov. No, that’s not right: Dovganivna—herself—Aidy—Boozerov. No, she can’t bring it back; it’s all gone. Again, like that time in the spring—it flared and died.

But she does retain one thing from this flare: the being above—in relation to what happened the night before as well. She’s broken free of the boss’s yesterday office; it doesn’t oppress her anymore. She does, in fact, feel better.

“Thanks, Ma,” Daryna says into the receiver she is still clutching in her hand; her knuckles stand out as if made from mother-of-pearl. “I know now what I have to do.”

She’ll go to Boozerov herself. And she will bring Gela’s case to light—to heck with the film, if that’s how things turned out, it’s not about the film—she needs to find out where these threads that run through her life come from, whence this capillary lace of human destinies. And she’ll also meet with Vadym: he’s the only elected representative with whom she could be considered almost friends—they have Vlada in common. He is her only immediate chance of undercutting those bastards’ show with which they plan to cover up someone else’s slave trade. This is what’s really important.

And what she’s to do with herself, where she’s to look for work, and whether she’s to look for a job at all—that’s all like scree underfoot, the common rubbish of life’s prose, in the same department as what to make for dinner tonight. That’s how she is seeing it at the moment—in big, clear terms, with her vision corrected—and she knows it’s the right way of seeing.

“See, I know you’re my smart girl!” her mom brightens up. “You’ll see; it’ll all turn out okay.”

“How else, Ma?”

“Only do be careful!” Of course, Mom is Mom.

Daryna barely contains herself before she responds the same way as to her boss last night, and can’t help but smile, “I’ll do my best, Ma.”

“Alright, you take care of yourself now!”

“You too, Ma. Call if you need anything.”

That’s a ritual phrase between them, and it means if you need money. This time, for the first time it doesn’t sound completely heartfelt: her savings, Daryna hopes, will last her a while, but how long can they actually last if she also needs to help the old folks? Aidy, after all, also has a dad on an engineer’s salary—it’s enough for the food, but not for the medication he needs. That’s how it all begins, that’s how they leak and flood, our little cardboard houses. Nah, to hell with it, she doesn’t want to go slopping around in all that again.

After she puts down the receiver, Daryna rises and, just as she is, in her flimsy nightshirt, goes to the window, throws the curtains open, and gasps with surprise. So that’s where her clarity came from, that’s what lit the curtain with the yellow light that she barely noticed for the entire hour she was on the phone: It’s the snow! The first snow came in the night!

Spellbound, she looks at the instantly lightened street, at the heavy white lashes of trees in the park next door and the roofs turned white, turned Christmas-y, like a picture in a children’s book: smoke is rising from one chimney, and the whole view looks as though the city had drawn a deep breath and stayed still in the blissful smile of relief. Her city—they can’t take that away from her, either.

“So,” Daryna says out loud, addressing no one in particular. “Let’s fight back, shall we?”