The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Room 8. Blood in Kyiv

And just like that, it’s spring outside!

The sun blasts from everywhere, like an orchestra that’s been waiting, bows poised, for me to emerge from the SBU archive as its signal to launch into a thunderous fanfare—a moist glow with a little blue mixed into it blazes from every crack, every gap between the buildings, and every puddle on the asphalt, and the asphalt along Zolotovoritska gleams like a freshly bathed seal’s back: while I was having my audience with Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov, the world got rained on! Wet tree trunks drip with sweat like the bodies of happy lovers, a whole new stream sprouts cheerily out of a downspout, and the faces of passersby—who had been looking increasingly oppressed and gloomy of late, as though the imminent elections were bringing with them a front of oppressive air into the city—have acquired the silly and joyful expression of those missionaries who call out the good news about Christ in courtyards, in Russian with an American accent, without a clue that they’re about twelve centuries late bringing this news to us; and new grass is so vigorously bright on the lawns it makes you want to turn into a rabbit and hop over to nibble it, and the buds on the trees have been instantly transformed into a visible stubble, into that translucent goldenish mist that envelops the trees in a gentle glimmer like the fuzz on a newborn’s head. Life does, yes, it does have its bright side—as, for example, in Kyiv, in April after a thunderstorm! How did I not hear it roll in? It must’ve come down in torrents—the puddles are still rimmed in white foam—I heard absolutely nothing… it’s totally soundproof in there, like a dungeon.

And it is a dungeon, that archive of theirs. Artificial lights, eternal dusk. Coming out feels like breaking free from a bomb shelter.

Two characters, clearly from the same building, smoking on the sidewalk, look up as one and follow me with their eyes. They might be from a different building, too; there’s some sort of a bank next door. Bank employees have the same eyes as the rank and file of secret services. And the same manner: false friendliness and a cold secretiveness. They all looked at me that way—everyone we passed as Pavlo Ivanovych escorted me out: down a hallway, up the stairs, another hallway, another set of stairs, all the way to the check-in turnstile. Return your pass, please. Of course, or else, God forbid, I’d keep it for myself and then what? The signature of the SBU check-in lady on that pathetic piece of paper would be acquired by foreign intelligence agencies?

There are things that do not change. Names of countries, monuments, language, money, uniforms, military commands, even ways of waging war—these all change. But secret services do not, they are always the same. Always and everywhere, in every country. One out of every six men convicted in the USSR after the war for working in the Nazi police had been an NKVD employee before the war. Had it been, by some bizarre set of circumstances, the American and not the German army that invaded the Soviet Union back then, these men would’ve gone to serve the American democracy—and the American democracy would’ve been just as happy to have them. Because there are things that do not change.

Alright, now I can finally have a smoke myself. Draw in, as they say, life deeply. Catch my breath.

No dictaphone, Pavlo Ivanovych told me, no records. And never a mention of him as a source, under any circumstances. That’s what he was taught, back in KGB school, and secret services do not change. It doesn’t matter that this ban makes not a grain of sense—except that it creates extra obstacles for me. I have to find a place to sit—around this corner on Reitarska there’s a cozy little café—and write down, before I forget, the most important parts of what he was so kind as to tell me. Although, the thing of it is, Pavlo Ivanovych cannot tell me what is most important, the thing that’s burning me the most, and where I had most hoped for his help, because he does not know what he is guarding. And none of them who work in that building know—and it doesn’t look like they ever will. No one will ever learn exactly which portions of the Ukrainian archives were taken to Moscow in 1990, and which were burned later, after the declaration of independence—in those fall days of 1991 when we, young and stupid, marched happily along Volodymyrska in front of the no-longer-scary, dark-gray ziggurat and chanted “Shame!” And inside, in the courtyard, people were hard at work—they were burning “material evidence,” covering up their tracks. During the months of September and October, Pavlo Ivanovych said. My dear Pavlo Ivanovych. An old friend of the family. He, dear soul, was one of those who did the burning.

Who was that clown who once quipped “manuscripts don’t burn”? And somebody else picked it up and now people keep repeating it like they’ve all drunk the purple Kool-Aid—as if precisely to cover up for the burning brigades.

My legs, of their own volition, carry me toward St. Sophia. Alright, I’ll take a walk; I’ll take a detour—exactly a cigarette’s worth, and then I’ll take Striletska back to Reitarska and come back from the other side. And while I’m at it, I’ll see if the lilacs next to Metropolitan’s Palace have opened already.

It’s not like I didn’t know that archives were destroyed—no, I’ve known that for a long time, since back when Artem told me. But I had no concept of the scale of this destruction. And all these years, until today, somewhere inside me there lived—of course it lived, how could it not?—a comforting certainty that one of the iron-coated safes on Volodymyrska held the source of those four fat folders knotted with strings that sit in Mom’s attic, like secret minutes from the Molotov-Ribbentrop meetings. And that someday it would all “surface,” as my Pavlo Ivanovych puts it, it would all come to light—the storm in government offices, the criminal renovation of the just-opened Palace Ukraina, the head architect’s suicide, and among all that—the fate of one common fighter for the slaughtered project: engineer Goshchynsky.

I did really believe this—that it was all out there somewhere, kept safe, sealed, waiting for a volunteer to come one day and dig it up. Doesn’t matter when, even twenty years later. Or thirty, or fifty. I knew I could not become that volunteer—it would hurt too much to read all that. It would be too hard to turn the origins of my life over again—like working wet clay with a shovel… I don’t want to, I do not. Seems like digs like that do require a kind of historical smoke break—to catch one’s breath, to take a one-generation-long detour. Children aren’t much use for this, but grandkids are perfect: Two generations is exactly the right distance, a systole-diastole, a rhythmic breathing, the pulse of progress. It’s enough to know that it’s all basically out there somewhere, waiting for its time. That’s what we’ve been taught, this is the underpinning of all European culture—this firm belief that there are no secrets that won’t sooner or later come to light. Who was it that said it? Jesus? No, Pascal, I think it was… so naïve. But this faith has been nurtured for centuries; it has sprouted its own mythology: the cranes of Ibycus, manuscripts don’t burn. An ontological faith in the fundamental knowability of every human deed. The certainty that, as they now teach journalism majors, you can find everything on the Internet.

As if the Library of Alexandria never existed. Or the Pogruzhalsky arson, when the whole historical section of the Academy of Sciences’ Public Library, more than six-hundred thousand volumes, including the Central Council archives from 1918, went up in flames. That was in the summer of 1964; Mom was pregnant with me already, and almost for an entire month afterward, as she made her way to work at the Lavra, she would get off the trolleybus when it got close to the university and take the subway the rest of the way: above ground, the stench from the site of the fire made her nauseous. Artem said there were early printed volumes and even chronicles in that section—our entire Middle Ages went up in smoke, almost all of the pre-Muscovite era. The arsonist was convicted after a widely publicized trial, and then was sent to work in Moldova’s State Archives: the war went on. And we comforted ourselves with “manuscripts don’t burn.”

Oh, but they do burn. And cannot be restored.

Our entire culture is built on faulty foundations. The history we are taught is nothing but the clamor—increasingly deafening and difficult to disentangle—of voices out-yelling each other: I am! I am! I am! I, so and so, did this and that—and so on, ad infinitum. But the voices resound over burnt-out voids—over the silence of those who’ve been robbed of their chance to cry out, I am! Over those who had their mouths gagged, their throats slashed, their manuscripts burned. We don’t know how to hear their silence; we live as if they never existed. But they did. And their silence, too, is the stuff of which our lives are made.

Goodbye, Daddy. Forgive me, Daddy.

A clump of winos with beer at a kiosk, foreign cars parked right on the sidewalk… I turn off onto Georgiiv Lane, which will take me past the baroque Zaborovsky Gate—there’s never anyone going this way.

In the fall of 1991, they burned “fresh kill”—that is, recent cases, Pavlo Ivanovych said, from the 1970s and ’80s. So there isn’t much left from that period. He told me this as if in anticipation of my unspoken question—even though I came for something completely different and wouldn’t have had the guts to raise this topic anyway: after all, it was Aidy’s, not my, family, that had brought me to Pavlo Ivanovych. I talked about the film, and asked Pavlo Ivanovych to be my expert consultant. With an acknowledgement in the credits and everything. The compensation is modest, but I pay by the hour—just like in Hollywood, yes, sir. I already filed for incorporation—VMOD-Film (VMOD is Vlada-Matusevych-Olena-Dovgan, but no one needs to know that) and sent grant applications to a dozen foundations; I brought the paperwork with me, and was ready to show it to him. I am assembling my team, yes, sir. Starting with him (but he doesn’t need to know this, either). And all for nothing: Aidy’s query went nowhere, Pavlo Ivanovych said. Nothing, they have nothing in their archives. Nothing but their clean hands. And, of course, flaming hearts, as their founder Comrade Dzerzhinsky bequeathed them.

They don’t even have a complete catalog of their holdings. And how could it be created now, after the black-market trade in archive materials became, in the 1990s, SB employees’ all but main business?

“One could take practically anything. It’s still not especially hard,” Pavlo Ivanovych added modestly.

“Yes, I know.” (I’ve taken my share out of certain archives, why should the SBU one be any different?) And, naturally, there were individuals interested in acquiring certain documents. Oh yes, of course. And they were prepared to pay. Yes, of course, I understand. I just kept nodding with an intelligent expression on my face. My long-standing conviction that one day everything would come to light and Tolya Goshchynsky’s truth would not disappear from human memory when I am gone was collapsing noiselessly under the attack of his words, like the Twin Towers on a TV with the sound turned off.

Nothing, there is nothing. I can go ahead and reassure Aidy: there will never be lustration in this country—there’s nothing left to lustrate. But they built a new facility, well done. A wonderful facility, with high-tech storage areas—climate- and humidity-controlled and full of all kinds of other bells and whistles—to house the archives that, basically, do not exist. A new facility to store the black box with who knows what left in it. Unswept scraps, sacks from the 1930s arrests that never once got opened in the last seventy years. They sat on these sacks of stolen loot for seventy years—well done. Now that there are no living witnesses left, they can start opening them—slowly, one by one, without any rush. There is enough to keep all of them, those who work in this building, busy until they retire, and their successors too. Just imagine how the poor things had to hustle back then, in the fall of 1991, to pull out from this mess whatever had to be burned posthaste!

“They are the Tenth Bureau,” Pavlo Ivanovych said. “The archive service: select, proven cadres.”

So, does this mean he was also once a select, proven cadre? And is still proud of that? And Aidy and I thought an archive appointment for a KGB officer was like a mission to Mongolia for a diplomat….

I was all sincerity and openness. I nodded like a wound-up bunny; I chuckled like an extra at a Comedy Club broadcast. And all for naught: There wasn’t a case with that name, Pavlo Ivanovych asserted, they didn’t find any. They did look, he gave me his officer’s word (apparently, the word of a secret services officer, in his mind, is still worth more than a journalist’s or a businessman’s!)—they looked, but they did not find anything. Dovgan Olena Ambroziivna, born in 1920, was not found among the operational-search case, or among the agents’ files. He is very sorry. He may well be genuinely sorry, and not simply because he’s just lost his chance to appear as a film consultant and to make a buck along the way. He did genuinely want to do something nice for me: I must be one of the very few good deeds in his life, in his entire select and proven service career. His one “onion,” like in Dostoyevsky. Although it’s not like that’s exactly what he was thinking; it must’ve just felt nice, as he looked at me, so pretty, lifted straight from the TV screen and placed into his office, to remember the young, and also so pretty, Olya Goshchynska, whom he had once saved from being blacklisted when it did not cost him anything. It’s nice to feel like a decent man—meaning, translated into the language of Soviet realities, one who, when required to do a despicable thing, did not take initiative.

So I believe him, my Pavlo Ivanovych. I believe his officer’s word. They did really look and they did not, really, find anything. “But one should not lose hope,” Pavlo Ivanovych said. “It is still possible that the case will one day turn up somewhere.” I didn’t really understand what he meant by that—another perestroika in Russia, perhaps, after which the re-reformed FSB would again open its archives for a short time, or the possibility that the case might be lying in a drawer in one of their senile veterans’ apartments, and would turn up on the black market after said veteran dies? Or on the antique market, why not—didn’t Aidy find Polish love letters from before WWI in a secretary desk once? Manuscripts don’t burn, as everyone knows. A wonderful slogan for the burners’ union.

“And what does this mean?” I asked.

“Agent cases were the ones opened for people who were arrested,” Pavlo Ivanovych explained. “Was your, e-er, relative arrested?”

“No, she died in the resistance. In a battle with a team of”—I almost blurted out “your guys”—“MGB forces.”

“Well, there you have it,” Pavlo Ivanovych said with satisfaction. “What do you expect?” Stunned by his logic (there’s formal logic, there is female logic, and then there’s the secret services logic—to confuse and befuddle until the opponent loses his or her mind), I couldn’t even react right away.

“And that other thing, the one you mentioned before, the operational-and-something else, what is that?”

An operational-search case, Pavlo Ivanovych explained to me as if to a proverbial blonde, is initiated for an object of an operational search.

“So, there isn’t one of those, either?” I asked, now totally having a blonde moment.

“No,” Pavlo Ivanovych shrugged. The aging, heart-sore Pavlo Ivanovych with the eyes of an Arab stallion. Or an Arab terrorist.

You see, I kept at him, worrying him like a limp dick. I just can’t wrap my mind around this—how could a person, because of whom an entire family had been arrested and deported, just disappear from the National Security Bureau’s archives? Her family, after the deportation, was even issued by the MGB a certificate of her death, with the date—November 6, 1947—on it.

“This means that when she died, the MGB must have at least identified the body and documented it accordingly, doesn’t it? So there must have been some kind of a case, no?”

“You’re right, this does not add up,” Pavlo Ivanovych agreed. “When did you say this was? Oh, in ’54—well, many things did not add up then. They made quite a mess….” And then he proceeded to tell me, asking me not to mention his name, how the archives were destroyed, in several planned waves, the last of them in the fall of 1991. And the first—in 1954, after Stalin’s death: they freaked out back then too, and rushed to burn “material evidence.” And an epidemic of suicides swept through the senior leadership back then, too, just like it did in 1991. Pavlo Ivanovych made it sound like a report about natural disasters.

“So are you telling me that Olena Dovgan’s case may also have been destroyed in 1954, after it was used to produce the certificate of her death for the family?”

“Anything is possible,” Pavlo Ivanovych agreed.

“Then, how would you explain this?” I asked, pulling the photograph out of my purse and putting it down before him, as if before a psychic. Or a witch.

“Is this she?”

“This is she.”

“Hm,” Pavlo Ivanovych said, studying the four men and the woman in the UIA uniform with a professional eye, “this is a good picture.” That was not a judgment he made about the aesthetic properties of the photo, its angles or composition—he was assessing its usefulness for operational purposes: the recognizability of the five search objects, lined up and photographed before Pavlo Ivanovych was even born. (Or had he been by then? He is the right age, about sixty, and Mom also said he was born after the war…)

“Where did you get this photo?” Now, this sounded like an interrogation question.

“From an archive,” I said honestly, “only not from yours—from an academic institute’s collection. How could it have made it there, how might it have, as you say, turned up?”

“That’s a good photo,” Pavlo Ivanovych repeated and put it back down.

“Yes,” I said, getting annoyed by this irrelevant demonstration of his GB professionalism, which includes, among other things, the ability to avoid inconvenient questions, and pointed with my finger at the man who loved Gela. “Look, this one, he even looks a bit like you, really, he does! Too bad this shadow got cast on his face here, but still, there’s something…”

Pavlo Ivanovych gave me a strange, quick blink: like a condor, not lifting his eyelids—eyes like a pair of jet stones. I blurted out without thinking, “So someone looks like someone else, big deal, the world is full of people who look like each other.” (I’ve even heard this theory that every one of us has at least one living double somewhere else on the planet, a trick of genetics.) And, the weird thing is—under the immovable condor-like, or maybe snake-like gaze of his (the eyes of an Oriental beauty, he’s just a damn Shahrazad, isn’t he?)—something in my mind clicked and revved up: “I’ve seen him somewhere before,” Aidy had said after he went to see Pavlo Ivanovych at the archives that first time, and I laughed then and quoted from The Lost Letter, “Listen, dude, where’d I see you before?” It must be that such an exotic appearance provokes bizarre déjà vu in people all by itself. Mom also said he looked like Omar Sharif, or whatever that actor from back in her day was called, and I would’ve said—Clark Gable from Gone with the Wind, which was not a movie they showed people in Mom’s day, only a Clark Gable adopted for an Oriental taste, as if edited by a Muslim censor to fit a location with palm trees and minarets. Or what if that’s a whole separate type—The Man Whom Everyone Has Seen Somewhere Before, and they need people like that in the secret services too, better to confuse the public?

In any case, I wasn’t taunting Pavlo Ivanovych, as he seemed to think—I simply pointed out an obvious thing that ought to have flattered him: his face does look a little like that sad-eyed handsome man’s in the picture—the man from my dream, the one Aidy suspects to be his mysterious namesake who passed through his family’s lives like a stunt-double in a movie, never having identified himself (an “Ad. Or.” Aidy says, although I countered right away that he can’t be his namesake because “Or.” has got to mean “Orest,” and only later wondered if perhaps I said that because of the movie White Bird Marked with Black, in which the young Bogdan Stupka, for the first time in the history of Soviet cinematography, played a Bandera follower who was not a caricature, and was named Orest).

But Pavlo Ivanovych, apparently, was not in the least bit flattered by this comparison because he informed me, rather sternly, that his father served in that area—and precisely in the “anti-banditism” department, how about that? I felt my jaw drop. And his father was even severely wounded in battle; it was a miracle he survived. “Oh,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “He remained an invalid for the rest of his life,” Pavlo Ivanovych lamented. I went ahead and made a sorrowful face, too, feeling like it was now he who was taunting me: it was my father who had been made an invalid, and not without the help of the very agency in which the Boozerov dynasty so distinguished itself. And since we’re on the subject of fighting “banditism”—it was my father who went to war against it barehanded and never came back—against banditism without quotation marks, the one that had taken over half the world: enthroned, institutionalized, ruling. And here was Pavlo Ivanovych seemingly stacking our parents’ fates in the same file, seemingly saying we should be friends: the two invalid-father orphans, hello, Mowgli, we be of one blood, ye and I….

I asked if Boozerov Senior still lived. “No, he died in ’81.” And again I felt as if Pavlo Ivanovych expected me to say back to him, oh, and my father passed in ’98. As if he were purposefully challenging me to turn the conversation to my father, something he didn’t dare do himself, challenging me to a game with incomprehensible rules, like the Easter Day knocking of one painted egg against another, to see whose father is stronger… but I said nothing. My exploded faith in the ontological indestructibility of every truth stuck out of me in all directions, charred steel, and the site of destruction was cordoned off with yellow police tape: Ground Zero, do not cross. And afterward, for some reason, I felt sorry for him—my self-appointed Mowgli, Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov. The invalid-father orphan.

I toss the cigarette stub into a puddle, to the great ire of a flock of sparrows (such tiny little nuggets—and what a ruckus!). I come up on the Zaborovsky Gate, to which they don’t bring the tourists, bricked shut for three centuries already—with its wildly curled baroque frieze and a colonnade sunk into the surrounding wall. Across the street is an oncology hospital; its patients enjoy a view that’s perfect for the contemplation of the eternal: a sealed gate, No Exit. Abandon hope.

I do wish Aidy weren’t in a meeting right now.

Should I call my mother, perhaps? No, it’ll take forever to tell her everything, and it’s not the kind of conversation one has on the street anyway. Pavlo Ivanovych did not neglect to send his greetings this time either, even asked me if she still worked in the Lavra, the Museum of Cinematography. “No, she is retired.” “Really?”—Pavlo Ivanovych was surprised: in his mind, he must have fixed Mom as a younger woman. Must have fixed her the way she looked, and not by her date of birth, from the file. He must have really liked her. She got lucky. And, by extension, so did I.

It’s only Dad who didn’t have any luck. That’s just how it worked—he didn’t get lucky, and that’s that. Actually, if you think about it, Pavlo Ivanovych’s telling me about his invalid father was a sort of underhanded apology—peace, what can you do, that’s how the cookie crumbles. Some get lucky, others don’t. Let bygones be bygones, and we’ll now be like peas and carrots. I really have no complaints about Pavlo Ivanovych personally—quite the opposite. There’s something likeable about him. Something even vulnerable, in its way.

But the thing is that there was another person who did not get lucky that time—the one of whose posthumous truth my father became the keeper, until he perished himself: the man who created the magical palace of my childhood fairytales, and then hung himself—right in time not to see his creation crippled. He, then, he is the one with the worst luck of all, although this really has nothing to do with Pavlo Ivanovych; this, in relation to him, is a pure and simple natural disaster. And Pavlo Ivanovych probably never thought about that man at all, and forgot how that whole story began, so isn’t it better just to erase it from your sight, so as not to complicate your already complicated life? Delete, delete.

It is at this point that something ursine inside me rears up on its back legs and growls: Hands off! I won’t let go! I wonder why it never occurred to me before that I, basically, spent my entire journalistic career doing what my father gave his life for—defending someone else’s essentially deleted truths? I gave voice to the lacunae of intentionally created silences. We are of different blood, Pavlo Ivanovych and I.

A KGB dynasty, that just blows your mind. Our family’s second-generation KGB man—just like the family doctors people have in Victorian novels: from one generation to the next, from mother to daughter.

It’s a profession: creating silences. Forging voices, layering the fake ones over the ones that have been stifled—so that no one could ever discern the muted truth. We have different professions, too, Pavlo Ivanovych and I—with directly opposite goals. No wonder we couldn’t reach an understanding. No matter how hard he tried.

It’s like when a bruised spot regains feeling after the immediate shock of the impact, only to fire up with pain later, when you think everything has turned out okay: with every step along the peeling, not-for-tourists St. Sofia wall, stained with damp patches and indelible graffiti, I succumb to an increasingly corrosive sense of disappointment. A feeling that I’ve erred in something, like I screwed up, missed something important, let it out of sight…. And lost a truly invaluable consultant for VMOD-Film, the single person, perhaps, from the entire KGB corps whom I needed, who was—literally—written in my stars, as one’s most important friendships and loves are written. How many things of the kind you’d never read anywhere must he have learned from his late father, the “banditism fighter”! Things you’d never dig up from the archives, either: the most toxic “material evidence” of the Stalinist era, the evidence that might very well make the slaughter sprees of the Khmer Rouge and of Comrade Mao’s cannibals look like training exercises for a volunteer militia—that kind of evidence, no doubt, flew into the fire back in that first wave of panic, in 1954, following The Leader of the People’s death. How did he say these were marked in their registries? “Document destroyed as one not constituting historical value”? Crap, I’ve gotten so used to being recorded, I can’t be sure I remembered everything right. Those fighters did not leave memoirs behind, either, for perfectly understandable reasons—but they may have told their children some things, and Pavlo Ivanovych is certain to know a lot more about that era than he wishes to reveal to me. Even if he is not aware of anything specific concerning Olena Dovgan who died on November 6, 1947. Or the man who was the cause of her death: I pointed him out in the picture, too—the last one on the right.

I came at it from the wrong angle. I counted on being able to see, finally, once I got my hands on Gela’s case (which, for some reason, I had also imagined to be a fat folder with strings tied around it), a clearly and precisely documented, factual skeleton of her death, with the first and last names of everyone involved, that would give me the springboard from which I, without much trouble, could edit my footage (Vadym did get it for me from the studio) and show on the screen, as if turned inside out, the whole story as I know it—know it anyway, without the SBU archives, but by feel, through my own life; through Artem’s basement and its rickety desk; through Aidy, Vlada, love, dreams; by the same blind and unerring method through which I know the truth about my father’s death.

Except that, no matter how certain this knowing-for-oneself is, it must be firmly attached to the commonly known—facts, dates, and names—if it is to become public knowledge. When did she get married; who was he, the man standing next to her in the picture—an undeniably married couple; and most importantly, how did it come to the betrayal that poor Aidy spent an entire night hunting for in his dreams? And what did it look like from the MGB offices where the operational plans were developed, and where the records of interrogations were kept and bound (They had to have been!) into someone’s as-yet unlocated folder with the label “Agent case” (That would be the one, yes?)? Without this factual dimension—even if it’s only five percent of the material, it is essential as yeast is to dough—Gela’s story cannot become a bona fide document, but will remain as it is—a story that belongs to the one telling it. My own story—lame-assed docu-fiction.

And I can’t put it together only as I see it; I can’t turn my own life inside out, make it into a movie for wide release. I can’t show how Gela summoned me to tell about her death: how she tossed it to me from her photograph, like ball lightning—a white flash, the blast of hundreds of spotlights in the instant of an accidental orgasm in an uncomfortable position, on a rickety desk, in a basement of a certain academic institute—how she connected her life to mine like a torn-off wire and, like a skillful radio operator, cleaned the terminals. I can’t put Aidy’s dreams into the film—or even that last one that we dreamt together (even though I told Pavlo Ivanovych the name of the last man on the right, as it came to me in that dream—Mykhailo—without, of course, revealing my source; it was a gesture of pure desperation on my part—a name without the last name wouldn’t get you anywhere even in the British archives, never mind ours). I know that the story of Olena Dovganivna’s love and death that I have recovered is true because my own life vouches for it—but I can’t bind my life to her case. Without a few critical pieces of documentation, which, let’s face it, can only be supplied by the very country against which Olena Dovgan had waged her war, her story, in other people’s eyes, would be no different from the movies my mom used to play in her mind after her conversations with Pavlo Ivanovych so as not to go mad. Facts, facts, Miss Goshchynska. Facts for the editing table, be so kind as to oblige. Names, passwords, safe houses, everything as it’s supposed to be….

I manage to jump into an alcove just in time—a black BMW speeds up from behind me, from Zolotovoritska, tears past me like a tornado, splashing water from a fetid puddle upwards in a grimy arc that’s as tall as me. Had I been on the sidewalk—I’d have been drenched head to toe. Jackasses! Rich jerks.

My having counted on Pavlo Ivanovych’s assistance (and to know how little I need—damn it, I could fit it into a cigarette pack!) came from the same mythical certainty that everything hidden is really out there somewhere, just waiting for its digger. Essentially, I was counting on finding precisely the same kind of original source whose absence prevents the four string-bound folders in Mom’s attic from yielding engineer Goshchynsky’s buried truth. I had been certain that I only needed to recover Gela’s case from the archives to have everything fall instantly into place—to have the last empty boxes filled. That the case simply would not be there—that the country against which Olena Dovgan had waged her war would manage, after its own demise, to outmaneuver both her and me by pretending that Olena Dovgan never even existed—for this I, the naïve cow, was utterly unprepared. I had been taught that manuscripts did not burn, hadn’t I, and I was always a straight-A student. And now what? What am I supposed to do? Where am I to look?

A bricked-up gate. No Exit.

Daryna Goshchynska, you are an idiot. People have been screwing you over in a particularly cynical manner your entire life, and you did not even notice it.

And the funniest thing is—I can’t help it that I do find something about Pavlo Ivanovych irresistibly likeable. Is this a variety of Stockholm Syndrome, or common gratitude? Because he is, really, my benefactor—it was he who, a quarter of a century ago, held my life in his hands: had he decided to score himself another star with my mom’s case, I would’ve ended up in some godforsaken home for orphaned children. I’d be making my living at a beltway truck stop now. Or in the subway. I once went on a news assignment about what went on there at night, saw a peroxide blonde the cops pulled out from a storage room: she looked sixty and turned out to be younger than me—thirty-four. A black eye and arms poked with more needle holes than a sieve. The typical career of a Soviet orphanage graduate.

We’re bound up together, Pavlo Ivanovych and I—and there’s no avoiding it. But beyond that, there’s something about him—although yes, he is second-generation, and yes he is Tenth Bureau, select and proven—something appealing in a very human way, something boyish, even vulnerable. It’s no picnic, of course—having to watch, in your mature years, what you spent your entire life serving collapse: watching people pilfer left and right from the archive where you spent umpteen years like a chained guard dog. And for what?—while some quicker-witted Major Mitrokhin was carefully copying and stuffing into his shoe soles all that “material evidence” that was supposed to be destroyed as “not constituting historical value,” and when the right moment came, sold it all to the Brits, and now sails his yacht on the Thames or somewhere like that, the bastard. And you sit, like a toad in a bog, in the dungeon on Zolotovoritska, guarding the stacks of gaping lacunae, and wait for your pension, which will be just enough to buy you a few fishing rods—and whose fault is that? There’s something moving about this, I’m telling you, as there is about any human defeat. (Aidy is sure to laugh at me; he’s already said I’m walking around all sentimental like it’s the first day of my period….) Or is it that I just have a soft spot for losers? At least for Soviet losers—in that system, losers were the only likeable people. And now, I still pick the people whom you could call the losers of the new 1991 vintage, from the ruins of the empire—I find them more appealing than their high-flying colleagues who, at the right time, found themselves closer to the Party’s coffers. Thusly is Boozerov so much more appealing than Major Mitrokhin. Even though Mitrokhin performed a historic act, and my Boozerov can’t even supply me with a meager couple of certificates in exchange for hourly pay.

How are you not an idiot, Miss Daryna, Daryna Anatoliivna?

I pluck another cigarette from my purse and light up as I walk.

I gave it one last shot, back in Pavlo Ivanovych’s office. There was still a small chance. A teensy-weensy little one, a rabbit’s tail of a chance. I grasped at it as I stared, in my dead-end desperation, at the picture with the five young people standing in a row, dressed in the uniforms of a forgotten army, four men and the woman in a column of light—the picture I thought I knew like a lover’s body, down to the tiniest mole, and yet I missed the most obvious thing: death! That’s where the key might be. I’ve always only thought about Gela’s death, separately from the others, but they had a shared death, one for all five, and it happened, if one could believe GB paperwork and dates at all, on November 6, 1947. And that, by the way, is a not just a regular day—that’s the eve of the Great October Socialist Revolution’s 30th anniversary, “the 7th of November is the Red Day of the calendar” as the children’s poem went; they most certainly did not just pick that date at random—it all looks like a long-planned operation, primed for a big-occasion report to the higher-ups!

I’m old enough to remember those ritual pre-holiday, nationwide convulsions: reports from the miners and the steelworkers, from the workers of the fields and the animal farms—this is how much we have mined, milked, melted, and harvested for the Great October’s 60th anniversary; and the workers of the jails and execution chambers must have also reported, correspondingly—this is how many we have arrested and eliminated, so this operation had been planned as a sure win in advance; the squad Gela’s unit encountered had come for a certain victory. They had come after easy prey—after medals, ranks, vacations, engraved watches, and cigarette cases with ruby-encrusted Kremlins on them. They knew where they were going: someone had shown them. I could feel the trail of treachery quivering within my grasp, like a rabbit’s tail.

“What if you looked by date,” I asked Pavlo Ivanovych.

“How do you mean?” he asked, on guard.

“What if you just, you know, checked the Lviv GB archives for November of 1947? To see if there’s a report about the liquidation, on the Lviv Oblast territory, of a five-member bandit group, four men and one woman, timed for the Great October Revolution’s 30th anniversary—that’s not a needle in a haystack, is it?”

Pavlo Ivanovych again blinked his protuberant eyes at me in that strange way of his, as if his eyelids twitched—and looked away immediately: “That wouldn’t be here, it would be in the Lviv archives.”

“No, Pavlo Ivanovych,” I said, as kindly as I could, “it is here. It’s all here, in the central archives—all the plans for the liquidation of the postwar resistance are here, the entire ‘buried war,’ almost a hundred volumes, code name Bear Den. If you gave me access to these files, I’d be happy to look myself. But you won’t give me access, will you?”

“I’ve no authority,” muttered Pavlo Ivanovych. My inside knowledge was clearly a surprise for him; he’s new to this territory—a journalistic investigation—he’s not used to it. He’s used to dealing with a different demographic—harmless scholars no one cares about, quiet academic historians, acne-ridden students, and bespectacled postdocs who submit their inquiries composed in compliance with form N-blah-blah-blah, who receive the answer “the document is not found,” and politely write it down as a research outcome—he is used to the absence of material strength. So I even felt a stab of professional pride: Don’t mess with us! He’d look, Pavlo Ivanovych promised. It was at that moment that it crystallized—the impression I got that for some reason he really would rather not look. And if I called him back in two weeks, like he told me to, he would again shrug regretfully and report, with his officer’s word, that he did not find anything.

Daryna Anatoliivna, Daryna Anatoliivna…

Actually, now that I think about it, I must have picked up that vibe a bit later—when he was escorting me back to the entrance and, no longer having anything to add, kept talking anyway, as if someone forgot to turn him off—talked on and on, like sand out of a gashed sack. He even reminded me, for the first time in our entire interaction, of that captain with shifty black eyes who had once “interviewed” me in the chancellor’s office before I began my pre-graduation field studies—they talk you to death, these people. Old schooling, done by the same old textbook, and what dickhead wrote those?

Pavlo Ivanovych, for some reason, started on his father again—as if he were still trying to play in the same sandbox, make his father friends with my hero, with the old man’s former adversary, make it all nice; there was one thing in that whole verbal torrent that stuck out and stayed with me—it didn’t sound like something Pavlo Ivanovych made up on the fly—that his father told him, in moments of sincerity (When he was drunk?) that he, Boozerov Senior, had “a lot of respect” for the banderas (this did sound like a straight calque from Russian), because the way they, the banderas, “stood up for their cause” was something “we” (one would understand this to mean both Boozerovs’—father and son’s—colleagues) still had to “watch and learn.” How about that?

Pavlo Ivanovych had said something similar about my mom, except not about the banderas but about her loyalty to her husband, that he would have liked it if his wife “stood up” for him like that—apparently he was having some trouble at work then, Pavlo Ivanovych was—and my poor mom was so proud of this KGB compliment that she remembered it for the rest of her life. I must confess, however, that I suspect this almost-dissident’s (Heaven help us, were they all dissidents back then?) respect for the banderas on behalf of Boozerov Senior stems exclusively from the fact that they were the ones who crippled him: all these “banditism fighters,” just like common bandits, respect only those who can kick their asses, and the harder their asses get kicked, the greater respect they feel for the one who did the kicking. But, so as not to ignore Pavlo Ivanovych’s aspirations to fulfill the official presidential policy of national reconciliation completely, I mumbled agreeably that it seemed like at some point, while working on the film, I came across this name—Captain Boozerov, could it have been his father? But this, for some reason, did not make Pavlo Ivanovych happy, as I had expected it would, and he only said that his father retired in the rank of the major—straight from the hospital. Captain Boozerov, then, had paid a steep price for his promotion.

That’s what I’ll say to Aidy: I went after Gela, and got Captain Boozerov, damn it! (Really, though, where did I hear this captain?) And, okay, there’s a miniscule, microscopic chance that Pavlo Ivanovych, for old times’ sake, will be moved to look in the surviving part of the archives where I so helpfully pointed him. And will, after all, produce out of its dark depths the victorious report of a certain MGB anti-banditism squad written just in time for the Great October’s 30th anniversary. And yet somehow, I find this very hard to believe. I failed to evoke in Pavlo Ivanovych the appropriate level of professional enthusiasm; I failed to recruit him….

I wonder how many people he recruited in his day, when he was still on operational duty? And now all their cases are sitting somewhere in his stacks, and he knows them, those people; he might be following their careers and could at any time pick up his phone, call someone like Aidy’s professor who squealed at me at The Cupid, and express his wish for something practical in exchange for his silence. Not much fat to be had off an old professor like that, of course, but there’re bigger fish—tons of them, whole schools of them that rushed, like salmon to spawn, into politics and government after 1991, to build up the country that had finally freed itself. And they, too, thought they had freed themselves—from the agreements they had signed with the KGB—they were giddy with freedom…. Meanwhile, Pavlo Ivanovych just sat, like a spider, in his dungeon and spun the threads of new dependencies. Maybe his life isn’t as hard as I so charitably worried it might be, and by the time he retires he, too, will have, bit by bit, put aside enough for his own modest yacht to sail the Dnieper—and the climate here, thank goodness, is so much better than London’s. And I foolishly thought I’d tempt him with my consultant’s fees—two fifty an hour, money I don’t even have yet. Come to think of it, I don’t have any money at all. You’re such a nitwit, Miss Daryna, Daryna Anatoliivna….

“Miss Daryna! Daryna Anatoliivna!”

Someone’s actually calling after me, and I didn’t hear it… I feel as if I’ve been caught in the middle of something indecent—it’s always like that when people recognize me in the street: an instant transition, like being captured in the sudden light from the soffits, like being catapulted from the darkness of the audience straight onto the proscenium: Hoop-la, the thunder of the applause, you turn around, stand there like a pillar of salt, grinning a plastic grin; oh shit, are my trousers splattered with mud in the back?

A girl—plump, dark-haired, and pretty cute, an expensive leather jacket thrown open, scarf messed up on the run. She’s breathing hard, wide-open eyes like plums, spellbound, she’s glowing, so thrilled she can hardly see straight: She made it! As if she’s run a marathon to catch up with me.

“Daryna Goshchynska!” She is not asking, but triumphing like a soccer fan who’s spotted Andriy Shevchenko and can’t wait to shout to the whole world about it, name, exclamation mark, pointing finger—look, look!—before her deity disappears or changes itself into something completely different as deities in every myth are wont to do.

“Ooff!” She’s trying to catch her breath, hand on her chest—some rack she’s got there, C-cup at least—she shakes her head, laughing at herself now—at her breathlessness, at having run, and having caught up with me, and at having me stand now here before her, and at it being spring, and at the downpour that’s just passed, and at the sun shining—and I smile, too, infected, unwittingly, with this puppy-like burst of her young youthful energy: What a funny girl! Sweaty, flushed, clothes in a mess.

“I’m so sorry… I recognized you from afar; I’m so glad I caught you.” She’s still not taking her gawking black eyes off me, her plump-lipped mouth is stretched ear to ear; this must be the first time she’s seen Daryna Goshchynska live: “I would very much like to invite you, may I? Here!” she exhales, full-chest. “Take this, please.”

A white, or rather, a gray butterfly—a cheap booklet, on thin paper, like all free concert invitations.

“On the twenty-fourth… in the Grand Hall at the Conservatory…”

“Thank you.” I react with my standard working smile now, and put the flyer, without reading, into my purse: I’ll throw it out later, I get mountains of this junk every month, and the mail’s not letting up yet—the news that Daryna Goshchynska no longer works on television has not yet gained national currency. It’ll be a full year before my name is taken off all the mailing lists, and I must say something encouraging to the girl: “Your concert? Congratulations.”

“It’s our class concert… for our whole year, I’m in the second half. Piano, it’s in the program… I have two pieces—Britten and Gubaidulina.”

“Difficult composers,” I nod knowingly, about to wish her the best of success, anoint her with a ritual blessing by way of taking my leave: go with God, child—but the child has no intention of giving up so quickly, she needs to pour it all out, since she’s caught me, and, without giving me a chance to break away with another word, she bursts forth, like rainwater gushing from a gutter.

“This is my first serious performance, Miss Daryna, please come if you can, please. It would mean so much to me! It’s so important for me, if only you knew.” She clasps her hands prayerfully to her C-cup breasts, which protrude vigorously under her leather jacket and the fashionable short sweater under it, so that a pale strip of her belly winks every time she moves—the current fashion is meant for stick figures, and this girl—nothing to complain about—sports a good childbearing shape, but her hands—her hands are made for the piano indeed: large, with beautiful long fingers. And who wouldn’t melt a little hearing this: “You are my hero, I watch your every show; I haven’t missed one in two years! I even ran away from a date once, to watch it.”

“Thank you,” I say, waiting for her to ask me why the show didn’t air last Wednesday; I have to change the topic: “That’s very nice to hear, but running away from a date—that seems a bit much, doesn’t it? Unless the boy wasn’t anything special.”

She wrinkles her nose, laughingly shines her enamored bovine eyes at me, and concedes that he was not anything special: a moment of female solidarity; we are both laughing. This is it, my audience. This is what I have managed to accomplish in my life. How many of them are out there, across the country, girls and boys like this? Lord, the letters I used to get! This is Diogenes’ Lantern and I’m Daryna Goshchynska, stay with us. And they’ve stayed; they haven’t even noticed my absence yet.

“As soon as Dad said you were coming to see him, I just couldn’t wait… I had a class at the Conservatory; I don’t know how I sat through it, and as soon as it let out, I ran uphill! I tried to flag a cab on the way, didn’t see any, and just kept running, the whole way… I rang my dad and he said you already left! I didn’t think I’d catch up with you!”

“Your dad?”

“Well, yeah,” the joyous stream whirrs forth from the gutter unchecked and unstoppable. “I called after you back at Zolotovoritska, as soon as I spotted you from afar, but you didn’t turn to look. And I recognized you right away, from the way you walk, the way they show you in your show’s teaser when you enter the studio, you’re unmistakable.”

“I’m sorry, and who are you?”

The stream plugs up, the prominent eyes freeze in their sockets like prunes in whipped cream. “Oh… I’m sorry. I, I didn’t think….” Catching herself, she blushes even deeper—all the way to her ears now, “I’m Nika… Nika Boozerova.”

Never underestimate the value of professional training: all my facial muscles remain in their places. Well, well. Of course, how did I not figure it out—the same eyes like jet stones, the same plump lips, and the same high cut of the nostrils that makes them appear constantly puffed, and her body is built the same, too—she’s short-legged and big-bottomed, a dark little pony, but a girl with hips like that can do alright for herself, much better than her dad. Pavlo Ivanovych can be congratulated on this improved replication of himself—a softened, more delicate version, not as oily-spicy-Al-Jazeera cast as the original: the features are seemingly the same but the treatment is in watercolor, not in oil. “My daughter,” as he bragged at our first meeting, with the stress on the first syllable. Nika, of course—Veronika Boozerova, a Conservatory student, my fervent admirer. This is she, in person. Apparently, the Boozerov family has decided to parade its full ranks in front of me today—who do they have left, mom, grandma? Bring them all out!

“Aha,” I say to the girl in the voice of an anti-banditism operative. “Very pleased to meet you.”

“Me too,” she blooms, malapropos, not having noticed how much like an idiot I feel. So, that’s why Pavlo Ivanovych took his sweet time shooting the breeze with me—for her sake; he was holding me back for his kid, until her class let out. But she is still too young to appreciate such complexities; she, with the happy enthusiasm of youth, is still filled to the brim with herself exclusively and her urgent need for self-affirmation (little princess, Daddy’s girl, and a late child to boot—Pavlo Ivanovych must’ve been pushing forty). And she springs at the chance to unload on me, all at once, everything she didn’t spill along the way while she raced after me with her booklet all the way from the Conservatory, up the hill from Gorodetsky Street to St. Sofia (and that’s quite a trek, must be what, about thirty minutes, and all uphill, no wonder the plump little thing is drenched!).

She reminds me, happily, that she has my autograph—in her mind, this must constitute some kind of intimacy between us, a sign of a connection—of course, I remember, the same loving father solicited it for the child the first time he ever laid eyes on me, must be nice to have such a loving dad! A strong, healthy one, not an invalid. A dad you can be proud of instead of swallowing every mention of him, mangled, as quickly as you can—oh yes, I remember the feeling: the last time I had it was at the opening of a fairytale palace, when my dad stood in the glowing crystal foyer in a huddle with other serious men, and they all took turns shaking his hand. I was still little then, but I remember; I know what it’s like.

Nika’s Ukrainian is natural if a touch too literary, as with all children from Russian-speaking families, without any slang—a Sunday language, starched for going out, not for home use. Although, it could be that she is making a special effort for me, cleaning up her act: I am a different generation, an adult woman, and she is speaking to me the way she would speak to one of her professors at an oral exam. Asking me for her A+, the straight-A girl. A good girl, engaged, diligent.

Aidy’s right, I have gone all sentimental like on the first day of a period—my eyes mist over as Pavlo Ivanovych’s daughter, and Captain Boozerov’s granddaughter, rattles off the list of the Diogenes’ Lantern episodes that made the most indelible impression on her—changed her life, Nika declares a bit too dramatically but with clear-eyed candor. She and her friends discussed these shows; they have a whole fan club going. They even tape me (used to tape; what are they going to tape now?). Of course, these are students, I mentally subtitle Nika’s nourishing babble for my exboss’s benefit, or perhaps for addressing the new owners of the channel—who also act as producers of a sex-industry show—these are students, gentlemen. These are the young people; this is our fucking future, you motherfuckers, young people always need role models—“who’s out there to shoot for,” as a boy taxi driver once said to me, spitting furiously through his rolled-down window. Young people need to have before their eyes not only millionaire gangsters and their Lexus-driving sluts but also—Vadym had a good phrase for it—moral authorities, and that is precisely why my never-heard-of heroes and heroines that hold for you no authority whatsoever are for these children like water for parched land: they gulp them down with a hiss, and beg for more! And what gets me the most, what cuts me to the quick, is that Nika unerringly names all the episodes of Lantern that were most important, closest to my heart, as though running her fingers over the departed show’s acupuncture points that only I could see, and by doing so, revives the pain I thought I had lulled to sleep. It is incredible how precisely this child is honed in to the same wavelength as me, and this wave washes me from inside, finally closing around my throat when she brings up my interview with Vladyslava Matusevych—she says she was still in high school then, and it was that interview that cemented her determination to devote herself to art. “Is that so,” I manage to gurgle.

Yes, even though Daddy tried to convince her that musical performance is a profession without any prospects whatsoever and wanted her to go to law school. But Daddy is musical himself; he has perfect pitch and still sings sometimes in good company—he naturally has a wonderful tenor, Nika asserts so fervently as if it made all the difference in the world to me. As if I had visited her dad for the express purpose of assessing his natural vocal abilities. Now it is my turn—I recognize these notes in Nika’s voice with unerring precision, I can’t be fooled: Nika is making excuses, she is ashamed of her father’s profession—she would much rather see him an opera tenor, even of the second or third roster. Really, how did I not think of this before: at the time of her childhood, in the ’80s—and even of mine, in the ’70s—the acronym Kay-Gee-Bee spoken out loud was already likely to elicit from other kids the same snickering as names of certain hidden parts of the human body, so standing up and announcing to the whole class where her daddy worked could not have added to little Nika Boozerova’s popularity among her peers. It wasn’t all that cloudless, then, her childhood….

“Your father’s trepidation can be understood.” I smile at her maternally. “Art is an uncertain business; only a few make their way to success, and law school at least guarantees a living. Especially when, like in your family, it’s a legacy…”

To this mention of family legacy Nika darkens and bites her lip—it must be a nervous habit she has, because her front teeth have traces of the lipstick she’s swallowed.

“Well, not really… Daddy, when he was young, wanted to take the entrance exams to Mechanics and Mathematics, he was really good at math, but Gramps didn’t let him. And the musical talent—that comes with the Jewish blood…”

Jewish?

At first, I don’t know what to say: Nika and I truly belong to different generations—the freedom with which she speaks of her Jewishness can serve as a line of demarcation for an entire era. Among my peers, being Jewish was still a mark, something profoundly ambivalent and vaguely shameful, something even those with last names ending in -man and -stein were loath to admit to, and half-bloods hid like syphilis under the covers of their Slavic last names. And there was no game better loved by KGB-paid informants than teasing a Jewish grandma’s grandson with anti-Semitic innuendo and watching him go pale, change in the face and chuckle along stoically like the Spartan boy with a fox cub chewing at his stomach—the other extreme from the opposite camp was an urgent, tentative, roundabout confession, to everyone suspected of being Jewish, of one’s own Judophilia and love for the state of Israel (about which at the time absolutely nothing was known but which was loved anyway, long-distance, purely for the fact that it was not loved by Moscow).

And in my student years, I often said such things myself—feeling, however, every time, a slight awkwardness at this forced demonstration of basic human solidarity, like the feeling one gets from demonstrating one’s health at a gynecological exam. To Jewish people, I think this must have been as offensive as any anti-Semitic barb. But the problem, as Aidy says, did not have a solution within the framework of that system and instead took care of itself later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when I simply stopped noticing who was Jewish and who was not, and what kind of Jewish they were, and who was whose grandma’s sister’s husband, and have internalized this not noticing so deeply, it would appear, that I now stand before Nika Boozerova feeling like the world’s biggest idiot for the second time in five minutes: oh, so they are Jews!

So that’s where Pavlo Ivanovych gets his Arab look, his near-Eastern charm, some of which, in a diluted form, has trickled down to his progeny—and when Nika turns her head, the magnificent prominent eyes, the tucked-up nose, and the plump-lipped mouth assemble instantly, like a 3-D image behind a stereoscopic picture, into a new kind of person: a Jewish girl, a mixed-blood—and what a comely mix it is!

“So, your grandmother must have been Jewish then?” I ask, now with genuine curiosity: this must mean that Gramps Boozerov managed to get married before 1937, before the great Jewish purges of the Party and NKVD. Afterward, Jewish wives were no longer fashionable among the fighters of banditism, and after the war, when they went after the Jews almost as zealously as in prewar Germany, a wife like that was a downright liability.

Something makes the girl hesitate before she answers, the expression on her cute face the same as her father’s when he avoids giving a direct answer. The whole situation strikes me as pretty stupid: here we are, standing in the middle of the street, lined up against St. Sofia’s wall, investigating the genealogy of Veronika Boozerova’s musical talent! But no, there’s something else going on, a different story that involves me, too: back in the ’70s, when Pavlo Ivanovych curated Mom’s museum, they didn’t suffer Jews in the security services, not even half-bloods—by then the USSR was fighting Zionism, and those few-and-far-between Jews who remained in the corps had to have been so select and proven that they wouldn’t cast a shadow at sundown—men like that would sell their own mothers to keep their positions, never mind some Olya Goshchynska, and Pavlo Ivanovych doesn’t fit the type, something’s not right here…. And Nika, although a product of a different epoch, also backpedals, tries to take her Jewish grandmother back, awkwardly, like a child pulling back her doll.

“Well, I don’t really know for sure… probably… Gramps died before I was born, and Grandma didn’t know either. They were pure Russians themselves, born and raised, from somewhere near Kuybyshev… Samara, as it’s now called.”

“Oh,” I say, totally lost now.

“Only we’re not related,” Nika says. “They adopted Dad from an orphanage.”

Mowgli bursts in my mind, like a bubble, the spur of the old guess cutting in again. “Your matinka still alive?”—“And well, thank you, and yours?” Oh God… how he recoiled—so obviously!—when I shot it back at him, so casually, back then, when we first met… Mowgli, an orphan, so that’s what it was, who’d have thought?

“Oh,” I repeat, as if dazed. “I see.”

Well, at least I—owing to Pavlo Ivanovych—was spared a similar fate…

“What if we took a little walk, Nika? I was about to go into the grounds, see if the lilacs have opened…”

Nika, instantly relieved, happily trots beside me, hanging devotedly on to my every word—now she’ll tell me anything I want and will go on for as long as I want. Along Striletska, the puddles spread resplendent as lakes and pigeons totter across them in pursuit of females, cooing just like Nika into my ear. I’m getting a bit lightheaded.

“Daddy was adopted from an orphanage in Lviv when Gramps worked there”—I decided not to seek Nika’s clarification of the exact nature of Gramps’s work there—“Daddy does not remember his biological parents, he was too little.

“He doesn’t even remember Lviv, he grew up a Kyivite—the Boozerovs were given an apartment in Kyiv when Gramps was discharged. In the heart of downtown, not far from here, on Malopidvalna, it’s now worth half a million dollars,” Nika brags—she doesn’t really care what she is talking about as long as it’s about her: she is showing me her life like her school report full of As;, she is playing her capstone concert for me alone, with a single piece on the program—The Boozerovs. From the top, one more time, please, Nika—one and two and… on Malopidvalna?

“How convenient, that’s really close to work for your father, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Grandma said that she wanted to move to Crimea, to the south shore, to Yalta or Simeiz—the Boozerovs could choose. Crimea was just being resettled at the time, but Gramps picked Kyiv. That was after the war, in ’48. In Stalin’s times,” Nika clarifies.

Yes, I understand. Her biological grandparents—the ones Daddy doesn’t remember—a Lviv Jewish couple, most likely, fell victim to repressions. And, most likely, they were executed, because had the mother still been alive, no one would have taken an infant from her—Nika’s familiarity with contemporary penitentiary procedures is also a legacy, although she is not aware of it.

Nika always feels like Lviv is her native city; she’s felt it since the first time she set foot there, back when she first went there on a school-group tour. She felt as if she had lived there before. Now she’ll start telling me how much she loves Lviv; I bet this number of hers plays especially wells with boys—even in the Soviet days, Lviv was our last symbol of Europeanness, and today the admiration of Lviv coffee and what’s left of its Renaissance architecture is a bona fide prerequisite for all intellectually ambitious boys and girls.

So, that’s who Nika would like to be—a Lvivite with a pedigree, and one and two and… stop, stop, let’s go again from the beginning: it’s 1948—how could there be any Lviv Jews left? There were still those who hadn’t managed to escape to Poland, Nika explains. But the Lviv Jews were wiped out by the Germans, back in the ghetto, during the war, and when, did she say, was her daddy born? January of ’48? So how?

“Well, many of them returned later, in the Soviet times already,” Nika says lightheartedly—many of those who had fled at the beginning of the war. Well, okay, that could be, all kinds of things were known to happen—must have been a couple of poor souls with pro-Communist ideas, and that was their undoing.

As far as I’m concerned, let her have her Lviv Jews if she wants. “And the Jews, you know, they’re all musical,” Nika repeats with an unsophisticated and totally goyish proclivity for superficial generalizations. Well, certainly not all of them? Doesn’t matter, she and her daddy got their musical gifts from the Jewish side, Nika insists—on her mom’s side of the family everyone’s tone-deaf, not one of them has any ear-to-voice coordination. Is that so, well, then, of course.

Her daddy, Nika coos melodically, in tune with the pigeons, had actually suspected he was adopted ever since he was little, because older boys in the yard had often mocked him as a little Yid. Really, what a keen phenotypic observation for a child to make. Nika nods, missing my irony—“Grandma Dunya, actually, was also a brown-eyed brunette, but she looked different; they had Tatars in their family…”

In a fit of generosity, Nika is ready to throw in Grandma Dunya as a bonus, but I delicately steer the kid back a couple measures: and one and two and… “And how did you find out for certain?”

“And for certain,” (Nika repeats this phrase with visible gusto, it must be new to her in Ukrainian and now she’ll trot it out whether it’s called for or not) “for certain Daddy learned when he was an adult already, in his thirties. Sometime around then. Someone at work, who envied him—because Daddy was moving up quickly and many envied him—wrote a complaint to the higher-ups alleging that he had relatives in Israel. This made quite a stir,” (her speech more and more wiggles free of the school textbook’s manacles) “for a while there it looked like Daddy would get fired.” Oh, I can certainly imagine that, I remember those times. Yep, so they were running background checks on him and stuff like that—Nika gives her shoulder a disgusted jerk, as she walks, as if to shake off stuff like that, and bites her lower lip again: a very sexy little mannerism she’s got. “Fortunately, Gramps was still alive then, and went to the appropriate offices and set the record straight. And for Daddy, too, while he was at it.”

“And Pavlo Ivanovych,” now it feels sort of weird to say his name like this, knowing that he is not Ivanovych at all, and maybe not even a Pavlo: the name, gray as a KGB suit, is instantly stripped of its living bearer, and becomes a handle one hesitates to repeat, like something indecent. “Did Pavlo Ivanovych ever try to find his biological parents?”

“Oh no!” Nika is shocked by my ignorance. “How could he?”

“Well, of course, but I don’t mean back in the day, in the Soviet times… now, after the independence; he could’ve done it, couldn’t he? Especially since he works in the archives… if they really fell victim to the repressions in ’48, there might be a record, a trace?”

“But what’s the point?” Nika objects sensibly, clearly rehearsing the arguments she’s heard from someone else—from the adults. “They are not alive anyway; if they’d survived, they would’ve found him at some point in the last fifty years. People who came back from the gulag—they looked for their children…”

But no one looked for Boozerov. So there wasn’t anyone left to look. And if they had found him? Would it have made Pavlo Ivanovych, a KGB officer, happy?

“And those relatives in Israel—is that true, or…?”

“Oh please!” Nika snorts. “They just made it up to derail Daddy’s career. What relatives could there be if we don’t even know the last name he had when his biological parents surrendered him?”

This strikes me as strange, but I know very little about orphanages; I’ve only made one show on this topic—the one about that village priest who adopted a few dozen homeless children, and those weren’t cute and black-eyed like the baby the Boozerovs must have chosen one day—like a shiny tchotchke in a store window—but ones that truly no one else wanted, defective ones, born with handicaps. But this was in an independent Ukraine already, and who knows what kind of laws they had back in the USSR; I haven’t researched that, so I better not say anything.

Nika and I turn the corner onto Rylsky Lane and walk past the windows of Kyiv’s most expensive boutiques, under the eyes of bored security guards who stir to life when they see us—just enough to follow us with their eyes—the two women, one older and the other younger, one slim and the other plump—and decide which one they like better—the same way I use my eyes like fingers to feel out each pebble of leather on the purses in the window displays as I walk by (even the cheapest of them costs a third of my former salary!). And under the leers of this sleepy fight club that’s pulled itself outside for a gulp of fresh ozone, Nika, a true straight-A student, instinctively straightens up, pulls her stomach in, and reaches to her temple to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear… looks like she’s still a virgin, or at least really inexperienced. An obedient, diligent child, and that’s the way she’ll be in bed, too: tell me what I should do, and I’ll be the best at it.

It’s what they told her, I think to myself, vaguely—she hasn’t decided anything for herself yet. She is still stuffed full of what the adults have packed into her, and it’s Daddy who told her, Daddy has decided for her: the child doesn’t need her biography burdened with some lost-without-a-trace Jewish grandmother. Or a grandfather, or whoever it was, so biblically ox-eyed. And at some basic level, one can understand Daddy’s decision—when one remembers how thick the miasma of anti-Semitism was within those walls on Volodymyrska: that was the atmosphere that shaped him, and it must have been the same in the home where he grew up.

Gramps Boozerov, if he was a captain by the end of the war, must have been shipped in from someplace near Samara right at the peak of the purging of the Jewish elements, and from that point the orders stayed the same until 1991, so Nika could not fail to inhale some of that miasma herself. That’s probably why the possible relatives in Israel hold no appeal for her; it’s no asset. An exotic Lviv backstory—now, that’s different: for now, it’s just an ornament, body glitter that gives her extra charm in the company of her peers, but later, if her musical career takes off, she’ll be able to put her lost-in-the-depths-of-the-gulag, Polish-Jewish ancestors to much better use, and better yet, because they are unknown, she could claim whatever pedigree she wishes—she could hint, perhaps, to a Western impresario, at possibly being related to Arthur Rubinstein, or any other famous musician who might have been a Polish Jew. It’s an inexhaustible resource! She could choose from thousands of lives that were slashed short, just as Gramps Boozerov could choose from any one of someone else’s suits in the wardrobes of Lviv’s emptied apartments, any one of someone else’s cities, homes, and even children—could choose someone’s life, already made, and wear it as his own. She wouldn’t even need to hire promoters or convert journalists to her cause: Jewish ancestors, vanished without a trace in Lviv under Stalin’s rule, are ready capital. You just have to know how to collect your dividends. I could clue her in right now (she herself, of course, hasn’t thought about it yet)—I could tell her about all kinds of our movers and shakers who are doing very well for themselves in the West peddling their freshly pressed Jewish pedigrees, the way Russian White Guard emigrants used to sell their estates, supposedly left behind in the old country, to the gullible French, and every Georgian in the camps was called a Count.

This must be the natural course of things: it is not the antiquarians or museum curators, but swindlers and profiteers who are first to descend upon the ruins, and they are the surest sign that life, as Vadym preached to me, goes on.

It’s stupid, but I sort of resent Nika for her biological grandparents—for her not having gotten curious about them, not having made her dad untie a few of those dust-covered archival bags. It’s stupid, she is still so young—her life still revolves around herself. She isn’t even quite comfortable in her own body yet; she hasn’t grown out of the phase where one fits oneself into the ready TV-and movie-supplied molds—she does not know yet what she’s had taken away from her, does not feel the emptiness where the amputated part used to be. And her confessions make me feel ill at ease, as though she were brandishing at me a poorly set, naked stump of a limb—and was completely ignorant of the fact that it was not her arm.

“When did your daddy tell you? Did you know already?”

We have reached the square in front of the Bohdan Khmelnitsky monument, and Nika lowers her eyes, focusing on the granite squares under her feet as if contemplating a game of hopscotch.

“It wasn’t Daddy who told me; Mom did… Daddy told me later, after Grandma Dunya died…”

She is evading again, the question is uncomfortable—and, adapting to her, because she is now slipping from my grip, I unwittingly adjust my step, too, and also try not to step on the cracks between the stones that pave the way to St. Sofia’s gate. No stepping, as it was called in hopscotch—it’s incredible how your body recalls—in a blink—these long-buried childhood skills: the way, on your walk home from school with the backpack on your shoulders, you hop from square to square, without stepping, and the stone squares are wide, so you have to make one big hop first and then, skipping, two little ones, ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three…. And all of a sudden, Nika’s youth, with all its unspent reserve of energy, engulfs me in a searing, apple-crisp wave, the near flame of her immortal girlhood knocks the air out of me, this effervescent ripeness of hers that could burst at any moment into a leap, a laugh, a chase, a game—a revelation. This is the reason people have children, darts through my mind, with them, you live through all this one more time, and nothing can replace it! How much older than her am I, nineteen, twenty years? If I hadn’t kept safe with Sergiy back in the day, I could have had a girl like this too—or a boy—no, a girl’s better….

And, instead of finishing Nika off with one final blow to the crown of her head (bent at the moment, as if purposely exposed, I can even see the whitish furrow where her hair is parted, like a chestnut’s raw flesh), instead of asking her, pointedly, if she really feels herself to be Boozerov’s granddaughter, and if she really never felt the urge to know what her and her father’s real name was supposed to be, I surprise myself by asking, with a hungry, almost zoological curiosity, “How old is your mom?”

“Fifty-two,” Nika says, raising her head.

A thirteen-year difference between me and her mother, not that much, really.

“Are you the only child?”

Yes, she is. I needn’t have asked. I feel more connected to her with every passing minute—like with a stray kitten picked up from the street: the longer you hold it, the harder it is to let it go back into the urban jungle. Why is it, though, that I can’t seem to find the courage to ask Nika if she knows that her dad and I go way back—that he knew about my existence before Nika was even born?

Because I, too, put on a show for her dad. I, too, played my capstone concert: look, here I am, the same girl you read about in Goshchynska, Olga Fedorivna’s personal case, under Children. I am the daughter, with the stress on the first syllable, no, back then, they probably had it in Russian still, dotch. Darya, born 1965—here I am, look (a turn of the head), all grown now, a well-known journalist, come to offer you a job working with me on a film I am making…. The way you show off to the doctor who put your broken leg together: Look at me dance, doctor!—or to the school teacher who suggested you take exams to film school back when you were in eighth grade, to every person to whom you owe something in your life, knowing they’d be pleased with your all-As school report, because it’s their achievement, too, they played a part in it. Played a part, exactly. If it weren’t for Nika’s dad’s goodwill, my life would’ve gone down a decidedly more crooked path. But this doesn’t mean that he, who lived his entire life under a stranger’s name, and raised his only daughter with it, should find my archival digging pleasant—why on earth should he?

You cannot expect of people the impossible, Miss Daryna. Or, as Aidy’s dad says, “Don’t brag about your stove in a cold house….” Why would anyone expect the man who still goes by the name of Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov to help me find my, e-er, relative if he never looked for his own birth parents?

And—what right do I have to judge him?

Nika, having broken free of the direction of my imaginary conductor’s baton in our little conversation, is back on the subject of music, cooing about her studies, bragging about her piano professor—of course, I see: she, too, is reporting to me. I, too, am somehow, tangentially responsible for the choice she made. A living mollusk in a shell cracked open: naked, defenseless, its flesh soft and runny (on a plate, in a seaside restaurant; when was that?). And a kind of new, unfamiliar sorrow floods me—not the bitter-scorching kind that parches you into a salt flat; no, this one does not scorch, it is moist, and it makes me grow weak, soft like earth under rain. I heave with it; I swell to the very edge of my vision, another instant—and I’ll burst with it, and it’ll come pouring out through my eyes, nose: Nika, Nika, you poor girl, what have they done to us all?

We cross the square before the monument—pausing for a second, as always, where the urban axis reveals the sight of two constellations of cross-topped domes with the fortresses of bell towers, St. Sofia’s and St. Michael’s, and your breath, no matter how many thousand times you’ve seen it, explodes out of your chest in an uncontrollable A-ah! (the awkward upright trunk of the future Hyatt in its green mesh of scaffolding does not, fortunately, fall into the same line of sight)—and step into the gates as if into a pocket of silence sewn into the very center of the city: behind the ancient walls, the street clamor fades, and here even Russian tourists grow sort of subdued, as birdsong emerges, loud and triumphant, and the babbling, the crystalline babbling of dozens of streams from invisible gutters—you hear it so much more here than outside…

One’s gaze flies up of its own accord, climbing the eastern wall of the cathedral spotted with patches of pink plinthite; Nika pauses for an instant, too, and then starts back on her topic again: the Germans swindled Gubaidulina out of the rights to all her works, got them virtually for pennies, but Nika will play the piece anyway, even without permission. It’s not a big deal at a student concert, who’d ever find out, right? Of course. And we’ll go this way, now, Nika—through the back, past the public restrooms, toward the old seminary: the old monastery orchard glows from afar with the softly goldenish froth of just-opened buds and the ant-like mesh of sunspots on the new grass.

On the corner in front of the restrooms a young Japanese woman, like a doll with an unbending back, is setting up a camera with a timer on a tripod, and we stop to let her take the picture—the woman turns to us, bows smiling like a cork-tumbler toy, thanking us with a mouthful of vaguely English mush and takes off at a teetering trot toward the clump of other cork-tumblers lined up against the cathedral wall. They all also mewl something, smiling with their mush-filled mouths, a red light blinks in the camera, the ballerina-backed lady gives a high-pitched yelp, must be to say, one more time, and trots back to the camera. And Nika and I walk on, as huge and awkward among these delicate creatures as a mama bear with her cub. It seems that for every square yard with a view there’s a Japanese person with a camera, I tell Nika, but she couldn’t care less about the Japanese, or their super-hitech machines (and our Antosha dreamt for so long of having a camera with a timer!).

Nika stares at me, lower lip bitten down, and I can again see on her large, childlike incisors the traces of the lipstick she’s eaten. “Miss Daryna!”

I stare back at her: What now?

“Will you come to my performance?”

She is not all that self-centered, this girl. Not all that insensitive…

“I will.”

It comes out unexpectedly solemn, a line in a sugary melodrama.

And I know that I will, in fact, go.

“Why,” Adrian asks, “did Olga Fedorivna not want to come?”

At the intermission, they opened the main doors, the ones that lead to Independence Square via a columned porch, and the thin crowd—looking more corporate than bohemian, made up mainly of the insiders, family dressed up as if for a wedding and friends and who keep excitedly calling out each other’s names in the foyer—spills outside in two separate flows, for a break. Daryna and Adrian move along with the crowd; she’s got her arm hooked through his elbow and holds on as though she were afraid of being left alone in this strange milieu.

“I don’t know,” Daryna answers, scanning the crowd distractedly. “She just said, ‘I’m not going,’ and that was that. Very resolutely, too, I didn’t expect it…”

Daryna imagined the outing as a family affair: Mom, she thought, would enjoy going out with her and Adrian for an academic concert, albeit a student one—she doesn’t often get a chance to do something like that with Uncle Volodya; he is one of those people who always coughs in the middle of a most delicate pianissimo at the Philharmonic, and if he makes it to the opera, he always tells everyone how the box stank of socks (at our opera, the boxes do stink of socks)—and on top of that, or actually, most importantly, Boozerov is here, which, in Daryna’s mind, ought to have held for her mom an absolutely irresistible attraction, greater than Ravel, Lyatoshynsky, Britten, and Gubaidulina put together. Daryna thought her mom would be as curious to see Boozerov face-to-face again after all these years as Daryna would be to watch them: a scene in a script written by life itself, only the camera is missing (she—daughter, witness, and accomplice—would act as a camera).

She liked this plot; she was already thinking which dress she would suggest her mom wear. Despite the extra weight that so vulgarly deformed her once-trim figure, her mom could still look quite presentable if properly packaged. The fact that Olga Fedorivna rejected the idea as soon as she heard Boozerov’s name—I won’t, I don’t want to, end of discussion—that she refused to be cast in this film, Daryna thinks, with the bitterness of self-irony, in a way, did more to align her mother with Boozerov, in Daryna’s eyes, than if the two of them were now standing here in the foyer exchanging polite small talk. Essentially, both had told her to get lost. Both refused her demand that they look back.

“That boy who played Liszt—I liked him,” Adrian observes when they, having found a spot by a column, get busy puffing on their cigarettes.

“Liszt? Oh, that one…”

“You could see he was really into it,” Adrian elaborates. “The rest of them are so stiff, like they’re in a military parade, these kids. But that one was different, he had the spark… Paa… ba-ba-bam… Paa… ba-ba-bam,” he sings in a nasally sorrowful voice, rolling his eyes, to the tune from “Years of Pilgrimage,” and Daryna can’t help chuckling, looking at him with tenderness.

“Remember I told you about my trip to the Zhitomir region? To see that man whose address Ambroziy Ivanovych gave us?” she asks, seemingly out of the blue.

“That old geezer who was in the Kengir uprising?”

“Yeah, that one, but the uprising is not why I bring it up…. It took us forever to find his place, it’s way out there in the boondocks, out beyond the village—so we were driving around, stopping at every corner, hell knows where we’re supposed to turn, and there’s no one to ask—and here comes this little old lady in a padded coat, just marching across the field, at a good clip…. We ask her, where does so-and-so live around here? And she goes all suspicious: and what do you want with him? And we say we just want to talk to him, about the Kengir uprising. And she goes—hard, you know, like she slammed a door into our faces: That was ages ago! And marches off, without looking back. And later it turned out that old lady was his wife, the one who was also in the Kengir camp, and that’s where they met each other, tossed one another notes from the men’s barracks to the women’s; you remember that, don’t you? You saw the footage…”

Adrian smokes and looks at the lights on the square—as if it were from there, through the noise of the traffic, that Liszt’s lost tune were wafting over to reach him, a soundtrack. Years of pilgrimage, the very beginning.

“‘That was ages ago!’” Daryna repeats with the old lady’s intonation.

“Uhu,” Adrian nods, and it is not clear what he is thinking about.

“That was how my mom said it: ‘I’m not going.’ She sounded almost angry. I asked, ‘But why not, Mom?’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to’—and that’s the only explanation she gave me.”

“It’s only fun to go back to places where you won. Who wants to go back to where you’d been beaten, Lolly? And who wants to see the witnesses of your defeat again? That’s not much fun, either.”

“But I didn’t think Boozerov was a witness of her defeat. Quite the opposite.”

“It would have been if your father were alive.”

“Exactly. I’d thought I could replace him in this mise-en-scène. I thought, for Mom, I was something she’d accomplished in her life, something she could show off to anyone. Rather self-important of me, wasn’t it?”

“Can’t say it wasn’t,” Adrian answers, purposely in the Galician manner, as he always does when he wants to soften the edge of his words. And smiles. Their eyes meet, meld together, and for an instant everything around them fades, is switched off—everything except an invisible circle of electricity that pulsates in the space around them and welds the two into one, until their two hearts skip the same beat, tremble with the same wonder, the wonder that each feels upon waking up next to the other: what a miracle it is that I have you, and what did I ever do to deserve it? And, because such self-generating (and self-locked) circles never remain unnoticed by those around them, since they radiate precisely the surfeit of warmth that makes life tolerable, the column where Daryna and Adrian chose to stand draws glances—the two of them become visible, as if held in a precisely aimed spotlight, a curious silence gathers itself at the next column where a whole pride of academic lions glows with its white manes. (“I’ve been in art since 1956,” goes a snippet of overheard conversation.) And there, already hurrying toward them, across the entire porch on his stubby legs, is the one for whom Daryna kept searching the crowd—in the concert hall, looking over the orchestra-level seated heads, and at the intermission, in the chaotic churn of the crowd rushing through the doors.

“Good evening, young people!”

“Pavlo Ivanovych! Greetings!”

They are no longer surprised that he spotted them first: that’s what he trained for, after all—but Pavlo Ivanovych’s current appearance cannot fail to stun anyone who is used to seeing him in what you’d call the office setting. Adrian has only seen men like this—happily shaken, drunk on their own importance—among his friends, when they became fathers and proudly took juice and jarred puree to their wives in the maternity ward. Pavlo Ivanovych is literally glowing, not just emotionally—he’s even broken into sweat in his generously cut, iridescent Voronin suit, even though the night is not nearly that warm; he’s broken into a sweat and glows, as if glazed, which miraculously makes his magnificent head (his skin, in the light of the streetlamp, has acquired a clear olive tint) even more handsome, almost perfect, like the head of a lacquered idol with a disheveled mop of hair, spiked in two distinct places like the horns on Michelangelo’s Moses, and his eyes burn with the inspiration of a biblical prophet: one can tell this is a big day for Pavlo Ivanovych.

Daryna struggles to strike the right note, feeling like a stranger at someone else’s banquet: any words in such circumstances would be inappropriate, but Pavlo Ivanovych, obviously, needs no words whatsoever—their presence is enough for him to include them automatically among the circle of insiders who don’t need to say anything, because everyone knows they are all in the same boat. When Pavlo Ivanovych shakes Adrian’s hand, he does so with strong, honest, muscular gratitude, one man to another.

“Thank you. Thank you for coming.”

He really is moved. It’s good, Daryna thinks to herself, quickly, that Mom didn’t come: he probably wouldn’t even have noticed her, simply—couldn’t accommodate her, too. Adrian is the first to find the right tone—businesslike and sophisticated at once.

“That’s quite a strong class your daughter’s part of.” He nods at Pavlo Ivanovych gravely, like the lions at the nearby column. As if it were a soccer team, Daryna almost snorts. But, to her surprise, the words prove right, exactly the kind that a stirred-up dad is capable of hearing at the moment: in them is not only an assessment of the first part of the concert they just heard, but also a fan’s anxiety (How will our girl look against such strong colleagues, will she hold her own?), a lifeline thrown to Nika in advance, in case of a less-than stellar performance (to lose out against the strong is, of course, so much more honorable than to outplay a bunch of slackers) and, most importantly, the voice of expert support, which Pavlo Ivanovych swallows with a neophyte’s thirst. It must be, Daryna intuits, that he himself doesn’t know much about music; it’s just a status symbol for him, like the directors in Soviet movies who inevitably had Red Army officers of purely proletarian pedigree play grand pianos as a sign of their complete triumph over bourgeois culture. And in this unfamiliar world into which his child has set out, Pavlo Ivanovych looks at every initiated person like a new recruit to a colonel. The men exchange a few more lines—of co-conspirators, accomplices, members of the same club—and Daryna, relieved that Adrian has taken charge of the conversation, recalls suddenly her own appearance, thirty years ago, at a school performance: dressed as a snowflake, she danced and sang a song in English, “The snowflakes are falling, are falling, are falling,” and her daddy, young, strong, and handsome, sat beaming in the first row, nodding his head in time with the music. Back then, when she was eight, she was still trying her best for Daddy, and the world was warm and cozy. What a pity that it all came to an end so fast.

Why did she come here? What does she have to do with these people?

She no longer knows. Why does this aging SBU-type, who has all but unraveled with the solemnity of the moment (just like a bad-mannered teen who doesn’t know how to behave in public!), keep insinuating himself into her and Adrian’s family? (At the moment, he is standing at a bad angle to the light, and she can see the white streaks of saliva, like colostrums, in the corners of his mouth—have your liver checked, or something, will you Pavlo Ivanovych?) He is comical in his inflamed paternal incarnation, like a yiddishe mame of Odessa jokes. Of course, how else? He’s from a “home,” a foundling: people, who were themselves deprived of parental love when they were children, will never learn to love their children naturally; they will forever swing between extremes like the color-blind forced to paint with colors, and what the hell does she want with this stranger’s life? Another life that she for some reason has to fit inside her?

Doesn’t she have enough of them already—other people’s lives stashed inside her, like in a safe to be kept in perpetuity. She’s done nothing but muddle around in other people’s lives, and they tramp all over her like on this square, demanding that she produce from their strife and failure a spark of meaning they cannot seem to achieve themselves; she has borne all this happily; she’s liked it, although there were some interviews after which she spent the rest of the day in bed, feeling like she’d been run over by a tractor. But for these two—Boozerov and his defenseless (like a snail without a shell) Nika, with her childish worship of Daryna—she has no more room, sorry, that’s it. It’s too much!

These people have no connection to her; she has nowhere to store their problems—and fails to see why she should be compelled to do so. At this instant, Daryna thinks her mother did the wisest thing of all: what had been is gone; it’s closed, and stored up in the attic, and really what point is there in dredging back up what’s been buried for years? You can’t go your entire life pulling everyone who’d appeared in one or two episodes of it behind you; no one’s life is big enough for that!

She looks at Pavlo Ivanovych unable to overcome her sudden dislike—those streaks in the corners of his mouth are especially disgusting. Doesn’t he understand that his girl has already grown beyond the age at which one tries one’s best for one’s daddy—and that no matter how much he fusses and beats his wings he can’t keep her under the glass dome of his warm and cozy world? At her age, Daryna thinks angrily, I was already living with Sergiy—and thank goodness, she, Daryna, chose well, because at the time there were many more men eager to live with her than is recommended for a young fool, feeling abandoned by her dead father and living mother at once, who would have plunged into bed with anyone who’d mistake her for an adult.

Nika still has all these problems ahead of her, and one can be sure things will not go smoothly for her either: such unhinged daddies guard their baby girls like bull terriers, another year or two and it’ll be Nika’s singular dream to be abandoned by her daddy—a diagnosis completely opposite to my own, Daryna thinks—and freezes with her mouth open. Oh shit, what if that’s the thing—our diagnoses being opposite? What if Nika actually senses in me what she herself urgently needs to survive and lacks completely—that very vitamin of early freedom (which I have digested successfully, thank goodness!)—and that’s why she is pulled to me like an iron filing to a magnet?

Daryna feels faint, fears she won’t stay on her feet. And instantly remembers what she has been trying to forget: her period is four days late. Her breasts are swollen, can’t even touch the nipples, last night, when Adrian kissed them, she cried out in pain—but still no period. No, it doesn’t look like the men noticed her dizziness. Daryna stubs out her cigarette. I cannot hold it all, she thinks, in desperation, there’s too much of it! I can’t put this story together even for myself, can’t seem to gather up all the loose ends. Nika—my shadow, my doppelgänger, an antipode of my forced orphanhood. Yes, my orphanhood—because at fifteen a girl is still very much in need of a father, and at seventeen, too—to have him guide her into the world of men without bumps and bruises; until she herself becomes an adult woman, she needs him. Is it really possible—that Pavlo Ivanovych is making up with his own child what he once witnessed (And lent a hand to, didn’t he?) taken from someone else’s?

Now he seems to her to be manufactured from a super-hard material that does not let through any light: he has filled all the available space between her and Adrian, and stands there beaming shamelessly, like an infant in a bath—mad biblical eyes on fire, white streaks of saliva in the corners of his mouth. She wants to push him away—and in the same instant, with a kind of lustful, disgusted terror she senses his nakedness under that luxurious suit: he is drenched with sweat and probably hairy as a baboon. She thinks she can even detect his smell: a heavy, military smell—leather, sealing wax…. It’s a dizzying, nausea-inducing intimacy—as if the three of them were in the same bed together, no boundaries between them. Is she now going to have erotic nightmares about him? Slope-shouldered, with a woman’s behind, on stubby legs? Men like that are usually good and eager at love play. Lord, how disgusting, what’s happening to her?

Finally, she catches Adrian looking at her with concern—and it’s like all her glands swell instantly with tears of gratitude: she is a little girl again, and Daddy (Adrian) is sitting in the first row nodding his head in time to the music. My man, she flares up, the dearest soul in the world, I’d give anything to touch your hand right now. But the other one—hard, dark inside, solid, with the heavy military smell—is pushing them apart with his body. He has wedged himself between them (and here a vivid physical memory flashes through her mind—that he has taken this position from the beginning, from the first time they met: wedged between them, and with such unshakable self-assurance as if he had a right to do so). He fixes Daryna in the gaze of his magnificent Judaic eyes, half-covered by the drooping cowls of his wrinkly eyelids, and all of a sudden says something so ill-suited to this scenario—in which Liszt’s lost measures spin and swirl around them in a neurotic dance (years of pilgrimage, Switzerland, pastoral symphony) together with the white-maned professorate that have seen better days, and the musicophile old maids who go to concerts to get their orgasms and sleepwalk through intermissions youthfully flushed—something so unexpectedly divorced from the young Nika, who is listening to her teacher’s last instructions somewhere backstage right now, that at first Daryna thinks he has spoken in a foreign language.

“Actually, I have something for you. On that case that you inquired about.”

Adrian and Daryna exchange glances quickly; the air between them crackles.

“You found it?” she asks, stunned. “You found what I asked you to look for?”

She doesn’t dare say “found Olena Dovgan,” as though complying with the rules once established by Pavlo Ivanovych: no names, no allusions, a schizophrenic secrecy, who needs it now? But let it be his way; this must be their reward—a thank-you gift for coming to his daughter’s concert, a barter. This, Daryna feverishly thinks, must also be something they teach them in KGB school—that any relationship between people is merely barter: an exchange of favors. But what did he find, what is it?

“Did you really? Pavlo Ivanovych? You found what I thought might be there, didn’t you? The anniversary liquidation report?”

“Not exactly,” Pavlo Ivanovych says reluctantly: he is letting it out slowly, pulling their guts out, the sadist. “But I can shed some light on the matter. Choose a time…”

“I’ll come whenever you say.”

“No, don’t come to the office, that won’t do.” This now sounds abrupt, sharp, like a cry of alarm. “It’s more of a private conversation. You know what?” He turns to Adrian, one man to another, as though struck with a sudden insight. “Do you by chance fish?”

“Should I?” Adrian responds.

Daryna laughs and listens to herself laugh from aside: no, everything’s okay. Simultaneously, she realizes that the lions at the next column are not discussing the just-heard Liszt interpretation, but are talking about someone’s recent concert tour—to Japan, it sounds like. “They have fish in abundance, whatever you like!” She hears distinctly the same dramatic baritone that’s “been in art since 1956.” “But it’s pricey, more expensive than meat!”

She looks back at Pavlo Ivanovych—did he hear that or not? She knows it can happen like this: when life, either under the pressure of your own efforts or on an incomprehensible whim of its own, clicks on to an invisible track and rolls off all by itself, and it takes all you’ve got just to keep your feet moving fast enough to hang on, this is what happens—everything you run across, down to accidentally overheard snippets of conversation and advertising slogans, hammers home the same message from every direction, confirms the rightness of your course, as if put there on purpose, to make sure you get it. And sometimes, this can be funny, even very funny: the director with the full version of the script in his hands certainly does not lack a sense of humor. Fish, then. Alright, let it be fish.

“I, you see,” Pavlo Ivanovych shares, “love to get out on the Dnieper when I have a chance, when I have time… on a weekend… to fish at night—it’s the best kind of rest, you see.”

Adrian nods thoughtfully. At the worst possible moment, the bell summoning the audience for the second part of the concert rings out from the foyer, and the whole of Pavlo Ivanovych comes into motion—from his rearing Mosaic forelock to the hem of his Voronin suitcoat (the bottom button, Adrian observes, unbuttoned, very civilian-like: did his daughter teach him?). He roils with impatience like an electric kettle, flares his nostrils, and turns for the entrance at full steam; he waves with a sudden unmanly, country-fair fluster at someone in the crowd that is rapidly congealing into a clot by the door, and instantly loses any resemblance to an SBU officer, or even just to a grown man, that he may have reclaimed in the last couple of minutes. I wonder where his wife is, Daryna thinks—she wouldn’t have missed this, would she?—and manages to find, directed at them from the crowd, a frozen, even it seems, a bit scared (fish-eyed, of course!) look from an inexpressive lady, clearly not one of the musicophiles, dressed in a fashionable pink-tweed, fringed jacket that nevertheless does not look good on her at all; Pavlo Ivanovych, however, does not lose professional form and demonstrates appropriate vigilance just in time, managing (he’s burrowed himself between the two of them again, and they are moving, three abreast, in the reversed current, back inside) to touch both Daryna and Adrian with his elbows and to nod, with every sharp angle he has in his body at once.

“My wife.”

They acknowledge each other over the distance, mutely, as if underwater, and the pink, fringed fish stretches her lips into a smile the same way Nika does, only the mother, unfortunately, bares her gums when she does it—not the most photogenic sight. It would have been just fine if Mom had come, Daryna concludes, feeling somehow comforted. But then, on the other hand—why should she have?

And then she hears Pavlo Ivanovych’s rapid-fire muttering above her ear—hypnotically similar, this time, to his daughter’s dove-like cooing, “Come this Saturday to the South Bridge… from the left, the Vydubychi side…right around midnight, fish bite really well there…and no one will bother us.”

I didn’t want to scatter the fish—so I didn’t call out to you…. Voice, you see, it carries far at night—someone coughs on Trukhanov Island, and you can hear it all the way over here. Crawfish? Yes, boys trap them at night here… and a ways over, beyond the Paton Bridge. You can buy some; they sell them for two hryvna a piece.

A drink?—of course, anytime! Good thinking that you brought some, it’s an indispensable part of fishing, ha… like tackle. I have some with me, here. In a flask. Would you like some? No? And you… what’s your patronymic? Adrian Ambrozievich? Yes, it’s cognac. Transcarpathian. I always bring some when I go fishing. Here’s to your health! Bud’mo, yes. We had this delegation from Israel once—took them to dinner at The Presidential, top-notch, everything like it’s supposed to be… and their interpreter did not know this word, he asked, whose “buddy” are we talking about? Ha… well, bud’mo!

Uff. Have a pickle—it’s homemade, marinated. I highly recommend it; my wife’s a wiz at these.

Yes, we cooperate with them. With Israelis, and the Poles. Mainly on the Holocaust, we have the war period fairly well represented as it is. With the Poles, we also work on Starobilsk, where their officers were executed in the camp, the ones from Katyn group. Pardon, I didn’t catch that? Sure, if we need something from them, they don’t turn us down either…

Oh, in that sense.

I know, Nika told you.

You know, she has the highest regard for you. Highest. She’s an ambitious girl, thank God… I’ve no idea where she gets it—I was never known to have any special ambitions, and my wife’s the same. And you know—I’m happy to see it. I’m happy. Having ambition in life—one needs that. Yes, we hope so, knock on wood…. Her teacher praises her too… her professor, I mean. Of course, one worries, how else? She’s my only one, you see. Do you have children?

You must. Children, young people, are a must. Absolutely. Otherwise—what’s there to live for?

Oy, stop with that talking, as they say in Odessa! Work—please. You know what they say: it’s not like work will run away, and someone else can drink the vodka. Here, let’s have another round. To your health! Bud’mo! Have a pickle… homemade.

Yes, so that’s how it goes.

And as far as my Jewish origins are concerned, I know everything I need to know already. I don’t need those… Israeli contacts for that.

Only, I must ask you—this is all just between us, okay? Not a word to Nika. She doesn’t know everything, and she doesn’t need to…

Fuckin’…! Lost it! That was a bite… beg pardon. We should talk quieter, the fish—they’re smart. Some, you know, grab the bait and don’t even touch the hook. Like people.

That’s alright though. We’ll bring them, as they say, to light. Let me just hook a new worm…

Yes, according to Israeli law I am, basically, Jewish. The way they have it, one’s nationality comes from your mother. If you’re born to a Jewish woman—you’re a Jew. But then my daughter is not, because her mom’s Ukrainian. It’s funny, a kind of a… zoological nationalism. I never understood this; we used to all be—Soviet people… alright, Russian, what’s the difference. But what country we had! Everyone was afraid of us. Oh! Now it’s coming, good things come to those who wait, as my father-in-law used to say. Fishy, fishy in the brook, Papa catch him on a hook…

And you are from Lviv, Ambrozievich? Well, then, we’re compadres. I was born there too. Peace Street, former Lontsky Street… the MGB prison. Yes, that’s where I was born. In prison. So the organization, you could say, is where I come from, my native land. For life. My native land and nationality… and my mother, the woman who gave birth to me—she also had a relationship with the organization. She was sent to infiltrate the banderas in ’45… with a particularly important mission. That’s how it goes…

Only it’s not a woman’s work. God forbid.

I do know her name. Lea Goldman—that’s how she was called. My mother, the woman who gave birth to me. In Israel, by the way, she is listed among the victims of the Holocaust. As perished in 1942 in Przemysl, in the ghetto. That’s how it goes…. And you say—approach your Israeli colleagues. You think they, over there in Israel, would be thrilled to learn that in ’52 they received compensation from the Germans for a person who actually survived on the Soviet side?

Of course, she died. And in the same prison even. But not until ’48! That’s a completely different story.

But please, I don’t want you to think that I am, in any way, making excuses, so to speak, for Stalinist methods. Our side did not, of course, value people… never did. My father—the one who raised me—he used to say, we put to the wall people who, truth be told, should have been made Heroes of the Soviet Union. Obviously, we weren’t fighting Hitler for human lives. And had Stalin struck a separate peace deal with the Germans in ’42, it would have been the USSR eradicating Jews on our territories; the Soviet side promised Hitler as much at the negotiations in Mtsensk—in exchange for the Germans closing the Eastern front; these documents have been published already…. But that’s, you know… who knows what went on! We have what we have: my mother was supposed to die back in ’42, from a Nazi bullet. And that’s how they counted her in Israel, because it suited them better. The Soviet government gave her the gift of life. So, if you see things from the government perspective, was it so illogical to suggest she return the favor by working for us?

Nika doesn’t know all this, she doesn’t need to… my wife doesn’t know all this, either. You have to understand… I’ve seen her picture. My mother’s, Lea Goldman’s. In her agent folder. Full face, profile. You know… it’s terrible. Especially in profile—it’s Nika, exact copy. Sends chills down your spine, you know. Don’t think me superstitious or anything. When you have your own children, you’ll understand. Nika doesn’t know, and doesn’t need to…

My father told me, yes. The one who raised me. Gave me life the second time, basically. That I survived, and grew up—it’s all thanks to him. He made me a man. Made sure I had my own two feet to stand on… I raised Nika to be that way too—she’s always taking flowers to her grandparents’ graves—at the Lukyaniv cemetery; they’re buried at the Lukyaniv. On Victory Day, the Cheka officers’ day, the week after Easter… I wasn’t even two months old then… in prison. They had me in the juvenile criminal system.

Shhh! Nope, not biting, I just thought it did.

Well, if it’s not biting, it’s not biting. No use beating the dead horse, right? Let’s have another round, so we’re not just sitting here…. Your health! Uff.

That’s how it goes. So I’m a lucky one as you can see. Knock on wood, where’s a piece of wood here? A lucky bastard. That’s what they said about me back when I was at the Institute. Yes, here in Kyiv, at the Red Army Street. I was the youngest in my class, signed up straight out of high school. Sure, at first everyone thought, you know how it goes, he’s here because of his dad, a protégé… Father a decorated officer, veteran. None of them knew what kind of schooling I already got from my father. You couldn’t get it in the Dzerzhinsky Academy. And I am grateful to him for it! Grateful, yes.

You know, I only felt I really understood him after he told me. Mom worried so much about it; it was such a stress for her… she had a weak heart already…. It wasn’t easy on her, living with Father; she spent half her life deaf in one ear—he, when he got angry, hit her from the left, he had a heavy hand, may he rest in peace. But it wasn’t easy for him either… to be crippled at thirty, that’s, you know…. He could not have children after he got wounded. He was ferociously jealous, once threw an iron at her right before my eyes… an electric one…. Whenever she went out, he’d yell at her in the hallway when she came back, “Take your pants off!”—he was checking, you know… to make sure she hadn’t cheated on him while she was gone. For the longest time, I thought that’s how things were supposed to be. That everyone lived like that.

Are you cold?

Here, have a drink… by means of prevention, so to speak, it’ll keep you from getting sick. Your health!

I sort of wondered if he were not my birth father—I thought, maybe Mom had another man before him. Like, this other man was Jewish, and they split up or something… children, you know, think up all kinds of things. And Father, by the way, fought all the way to Berlin, did Nika tell you? Yes, the entire war. A hero: twice decorated with the Order of the Red Banner. And then to spend years laid up in sanatoriums—what kind of life is that? For an officer?

Oh! Shhh! Aha! Got ’im!

I gotcha right here brother, don’t even try it… a perch! That’s alright, he’ll go into soup. Let’s get him in here, in the net—hold it out for me, would you please? Yes, to keep them underwater, fresh—see what beauties I got here? There. Thank you.

Yes… so that’s how it goes.

Turns out I really am a bastard. Only from a different woman. Who my father was is unknown. She never told them… my birth mother. I was fifty the first time I saw her picture. These pictures, taken in prison—a person looks different in them than she does outside, you know. Especially women. Did you see our star, Yulia Tymoshenko—the way she came out of the Lukyaniv Prison? That’s about the stage when you can take the pictures—when you can already see the way the woman is going to look in the camps. The eyes change… the look… but still, you could see she was a beautiful girl…. Lea Goldman. Davydivna was her patronymic. I understand she went by Rachel. She was just shy of twenty-three. I, soon as I laid my eyes on that picture, told myself: Nika must not see this, ever. God forbid. Especially that profile… it just stands before my eyes.

That was a mistake she made, of course—not telling them who the father was. Worst mistake she could have made. If she’d told them, she’d have had a chance. Had she said anything, anything at all… made something up, done something… to cooperate with the investigation. They would have tried to use her again, of course—you didn’t just write off people like that in Western Ukraine at the time. My father—Boozerov, that’s what he said about it, he called it sabotage. It was criminal negligence to lose an agent with such experience. Two and a half years among the banderas—that’s not nothing! In any case, the MGB would have let her live, that’s for sure. Yes, they were angry at her, of course they were—they’d sent her into the enemy camp with a mission, and she’d disappeared! For two and a half years—vanished, as if the ground swallowed her whole, not a trace. Of course, what’s the first thing they thought—that’s she’d sided with the bandits… but still, they would’ve kept her, agents like that were highly valued.

Beg pardon? Well, whether they trusted her or not—that’s, pardon me, just sentiment, pink snot…. They didn’t trust anyone! There wasn’t a single agent in Western Ukraine at the time who was trusted. And they were right not to, I’ll tell you. Remember what happened with Stashynsky? Well, there you go. But you don’t need me telling you this—your own families fought… on that other side. So what if they didn’t trust her! Until he or she is deactivated, an agent is active, on duty, you could say. That’s what Father told me at first… Boozerov—he told me that my mother was killed in the line of duty…. He actually may not have known everything himself, and if he did, he wouldn’t have thought so much of it; they had a different view of things—men from the front, you know, those who’d gone through Germany. They were used to, you know, not being soft on the enemy. But this was different. She was Soviet citizen already. An agent with a special mission. Her death was a gross institutional error. She had to live. Two and a half years, so much information. She could have lived. If only she hadn’t kept silent. That was the one thing she absolutely could not do. She should not have riled them up like that… young men.

Are you getting cold? No? Mind the breeze, watch you don’t catch a cold…

Yes, they were interrogating her. And weren’t doing it right. Now, my father—he was a first-class interrogator! Back when I was little, he’d put me through one of his wringers every so often—whether you wanted to or not, you’d tell him everything as good as under oath. And he had this way of twisting your ear—make you go down on your knees! Now, I don’t want you to think he was some kind of… sadist. I think, he loved me in his own way, was proud of me. Just—times were different, the methods were different…. And it worked, you know! It worked…

That I survived is entirely his doing. His exclusively. However things were, you know what they say: she’s not the mother who brought you forth, she’s the mother who raised you. I was two months old when she… when she passed. Not even quite that. Do you know what the orphanage mortality rate was for babies under a year of age? And I survived. It was only when he told me for the first time… about my mother, and I was an adult already… married… only then did I understand why he sent me into the organization. That was the right thing to do. He did well. Otherwise, I don’t know what would’ve come of me… I, when I was young, wanted to hang myself. They pulled me out of a noose… in eighth grade.

Did you serve, Ambrozievich? Oh, after university… a lieutenant? Which branch? Oh, that’s where my father-in-law served, too, may he rest in peace. Go ahead, pour another one; no use just holding on to the glassware. To service! Uff.

You know, there is this concept out there… they teach it in the military, too, from day one: understanding the service. A security services officer is always on duty; that’s what we were taught… what he was taught, my father—and he became cripple at thirty; after he got wounded, he couldn’t have his own children… so for him I was his last mission. For the rest of his life. That’s service! Do you understand? Shtrafbat, penal battalion at home, so to speak. He guarded shtrafbats at the front, that’s what he did, before he was sent into the Western. Guarded the men who had to pay with their blood… Vysotsky has a song, remember? “We are not stra-ight up, we are shtraf-bat/we wo-on’t be le-aving notes—count me a Com-munist….” That’s a good song, very soulful. Well, that’s how Father saw me—I was in a shtrafbat. Paying for my birth mother… who died. Escaped, basically… forever. I saw the agreement in her file—the agreement to work for the government. Written in her own hand. And—not a single report afterward! Not a single one. An utter failure. Two and a half years, that’s no joke! For every failure like that someone had to be held responsible….

No, I don’t want you to think I’m making excuses for… I don’t even know if he knew it all… Boozerov—if they’d apprised him of the situation, and to what extent… but I understood his service! I understood why he raised me the way he did. When my mom, sometimes, would hide me from him, when I was little… when he’d take his belt, his army belt with a brass buckle, and wrap it around his hand, like so… he’d yell at her: “You,” he yelled, “you stupid bitch, you don’t know nothing, it’s for his own good—it’ll make him meaner!” That was his idea of education… his methods. Now, of course, we see it all differently. But that was a different time. That’s what I’m saying; it all depends on your perspective.

I wanted to kill him when I was young… once. After he twisted my ear at school, in front of the whole class… forced me to my knees… and made me apologize standing there like that, say I won’t do it again—I was a troublemaker when I was little… I still remember how quiet it was… and everyone’s eyes, the entire class looking at me… ugh… I ran away from home after that… waited to catch him, with a shiv. That was back before I knew anything… I was young. A boy…

You must be thinking, what’s the point of all this, right? Why’d I invite you to talk business, and then sit here, telling stories?

That’s how I can tell you don’t fish. Fishing—it takes patience, persistence. It’s good training, you know… same as tracking a target, basically. Everyone’s always in such rush… and in the end, the winners are the ones who can wait. And, of course, know when to hook—when you’ve got a bite, that is.

And they’re not biting right now. Well, alright, we’ll just wait. See how the float’s moving? That’s fry playing with it.

You know, back when I was a cadet, there was this one incident. I volunteered—went along with a soldier; they sent them out on these missions: gave a man a document marked Top Secret, three typewritten pages—they’d put it in a briefcase, lock the briefcase with a handcuff to the guy’s wrist, put the guy into a jeep, and send him off—to us, one of our offices. And next to the soldier, there was this little red button—a “self-liquidator”… if in danger, the soldier has to press that button—and self-liquidate together with the briefcase. And I sat there and stared at that button the whole way. Couldn’t take my eyes off it. That’s why I came along… I stared and thought: Now—or should I wait another minute? Now—or wait another bit? Rode a hundred and twenty five miles like that. And you know, it helped. I didn’t have ideas like that after that… for a long time. Knowing how to wait—that’s the thing. That is the key. Another minute, another day. Someone will press your button for you eventually, so why hurry? Why jump the line?

No, it was intelligence that worked with her: blue bloods—that’s how they thought of themselves. Everyone wants to think themselves better than they really are, don’t they? They were trained in Moscow, in the Dzerzhinsky Academy. And here, in Ukraine—this was their finishing school, to train them for the dirty work, at detention sites. Beg pardon? I couldn’t say I know about that—if anyone ever self-liquidated… some might have… back under Stalin, when there was still fear. In my memory, there wasn’t anyone left who was stupid enough. And no one cared about those three pages—that was just, boilerplate, you know. Half of our archive, Daryna Anatoliivna, consists of boilerplate like that. The common, pardon me, bullshit. So please don’t think that as soon as you find a document—that’s it. Documents—they are written by people, you know.

Only please don’t tell Nika.

Well, one never knows… you might run into each other somewhere.

She is the only one I have. My wife—that’s, you know…

Nika, when she was born, weighed just over four pounds. And five ounces. I went to the milk kitchen… fed her from bottle myself; my wife didn’t have enough milk. Had it been a boy, I don’t know if I’d have managed. It’s different with a girl… as long as I can stay on my feet, she’ll need me.

So that’s how it goes…. Another one? To our children…. You should have your own, have them soon, don’t put it off, someone has to help the demographic situation in the country! I’m kidding, of course. Alright, here we go! Uff… down it goes…. My father-in-law used to say, if work gets in the way of drinking, time to quit working. He, my father-in-law, was also from the military, rest his soul. Retired in the rank of lieutenant colonel, even made it to Afghanistan. And wished to be buried where he was born, in the Cherkasy region… in the village both he and his wife came from. He and I went fishing there. He was such a character, you know… always kept himself busy. He retired in ’91—and became a taxi driver. A Soviet Army lieutenant colonel—working the wheel like a common cabbie! Why not? he’d say. I’ve got my own car; I’ll make enough to cover the gas, and the passengers share cigarettes—so I’m ahead all around. That’s the kind of man he was… humble. That works better in the army; we had it a bit differently in our organization. He helped me a lot in this life. I was fortunate to have him. I’m lucky, I’m telling you.

My mother-in-law—she got bent out of shape a little when she learned I was adopted by the Boozerovs. With her, it was a simple, rural thing, you know—she wouldn’t have people say she let her daughter marry a Jew… a Jew, please! She got her daughter worked up against it, too. The wife got scared they’d ship me somewhere provincial, just to be on the safe side, and she’d already got a taste of the good life. Good thing my father-in-law didn’t fall for it, set them both straight… my wife and my mother-in-law, too. After Father, Boozerov, told me… if it weren’t for that, he may not have told me the whole story. But the way things went—he had to interfere… reveal all his inside information, so to speak. Yes…

I think that’s what did him in. In a certain sense, so to speak… cut him down. That fact that his life’s work—everything he did, raising me—didn’t do anyone any good. His service. I was a captain already. The youngest captain in Republic’s entire KGB! If you see things from the government perspective, he really should’ve been made a Hero for that… only no one appreciated it anymore. They used the old man up—and spat him out, forgot about him. And it was quite a shock to me—when he told me.

So that’s how it all started… because of the Jews.

Dear, dear Daryna Anatoliivna… ask your matinka—she ought to remember, it was a colleague of hers. Yeah, yes. They worked at the same museum… it was a Jewish woman who applied for emigration to Israel. And I was working with her… talked to her. Spent two months talking to her, and all for naught. And how did you think it worked? That we just let them leave?

Ha… we have a whole field branch there, in Israel. Even Vysotsky had a song, do you remember? “We missed our chance with Golda Meier’s spot, but one man of every four is our former folk.” A joke? Well, in every joke there’s a seed of truth, as they say… a grain. He cooperated with the organization too, Volodya Vysotsky did. What, you didn’t know?

What did you expect? Of course, they were not trusted… the Jews. There were cases when veterans from among them applied for emigration, even Heroes of the Soviet Union. So many scandals! Who knew it would all end… so soon.

Aha! I got something! Come on, come to Daddy… gotcha!

Darn it, another roach… such a little thing, might as well throw him back in.

This moment here—this is the fun: when you’ve got something on the hook, but you don’t yet know what it is! The most important moment, this. And back then I was still young, I hadn’t seen real fire, so to speak, and pulled up with that Jewish woman a whole, pardon me, cabal…. She talked to someone somewhere—they had their networks working like clockwork to help their own—and they found a way for her to get out… to slip off the hook, basically. They thought, you see, that I was also one of their own, only closeted—that maybe I changed to a Russian last name, when the government was fighting the rootless cosmopolitans. And such closeted people—they were rarely accepted into the corps, they worked as agents mostly, and worked hard. You’d work hard too, if, for instance, your mother was Jewish and your father was in the Nazi-sanctioned police! A schutzman, yeah… you’d spend your life bending over backwards. Pardon? Well, we won’t name names, these are respectable people now, in high posts. It’s not important. So anyway, back then they decided among themselves that I must be one of those people—that I covered up, you know, some stains on my biography and got into the organization with a perfect record. They thought they’d found a weak spot, and that’s where they hit—to take the fire off their woman and put me on the spot… the best move. It couldn’t fail.

Beg pardon? Oh… that, you know, is just something that people think—that the KGB was omnipotent and no one could get around it. In fact, the organization was as much of a mess as everything else… bureaucratic, backstabbing… I, too, had to write an explanatory report to my bosses to account for the two months when I didn’t get anything done. And then a thing like this hits—a complaint from your target, plus an anonymous letter—and that’s it, you’ve been marked! The shadow’s been cast: Jew won’t cross a Jew, you know, and that I’m probably getting help from some Sochnut of theirs, their Jewish till… for protecting my own from the KGB. What’s the first thing? To cast shadow on a person—and you go prove yourself an upstanding citizen after that! Go prove you weren’t double-dealing. That was a good, smart plan they had—they just miscalculated a bit. No one knew what really happened, remember… I didn’t know anything myself yet.

And I was in law school by then, about to get my degree. Long-distance… got promoted to captain. Things were just starting to go well.

It was hard, you know… it’s always hard when you are not trusted. When behind your back, people are happy that you’ve stumbled, because there’s a line waiting for your spot already. And at home—there was the same emptiness, nothing to lean against. The old man drank himself numb… my father, Boozerov. That’s how he told me—he was drunk; Mom just cried. He didn’t live much longer after that. He had a hard time dying, too—he had a grudge… against the whole world… cirrhosis—that’s not a walk in the park. Nika didn’t know him; she was born later… when he was already gone.

Are you getting a draft there? No? Your feet warm enough?

A stretch like that… you don’t want to go on living, don’t want to go home at night. What’s the point, you ask yourself? Just push the button, and that’s it. I didn’t know everything back then… but it was a shock, a real shock. And the thing of it was—it was all like the world conspired to mock me, you know, that yes, I am a Jew after all! A bastard. And that my mother, the woman who gave birth to me, was also under suspicion, same as I… in double-dealing. It’s like… a curse or something. You start thinking these thoughts and… God forbid.

This fear… I don’t fear for myself anymore, I don’t want you to think that… but it’s inside me somewhere—since then, sitting there. In my gut. Thank God Nika doesn’t know everything. She’s got her own life. A clean slate, so to speak… let it be….

I think Father didn’t know everything either. But it cut him down. Finished him off, it did, that he had to go explain things—because of me. He had to go all the way up to Moscow, because here in Kyiv, people just looked at him like he was nuts. No one wanted to take responsibility for the decision, they were all too scared for their own hides… and, well, they wouldn’t miss a chance to bite off a chunk of someone else’s. He was a stranger here. An outsider to the very organization he’d given his life to. Old fart who had no more influence anymore. So what, he was a distinguished pensioner? If all his service, everything he’d given his life to, just think—blew up like… like feathers—from a single fabricated denunciation. How he yelled when he’d had a drink: Cursed… Rats!—he yelled. He said that thing about the banderas once, I won’t forget it as long as I live—that he envied them the way they stood up for what was theirs! For thirty years he hadn’t spoken a word of it—and now it came back. I looked at him with new eyes then. That was before the ’91 coup, you must remember, before all the changes….

It’s all very complicated, you know. And you want things to be just cut-and-dried, nice and tidy! Like now—you must be sitting there, listening to me talk and wondering, what’s all this about. Yes? I can tell… everyone’s in such rush, can’t wait…. You want the archives opened, want your documents brought out to you on a silver tray, want them declassified before the fifty-year term runs out…. Do you know how many waves like this I’ve lived through already? And you with your film are just the same. And the consequences—have you thought about that? People’s children, grandchildren. What have they done to deserve that?

Eh, Daryna Anatoliivna… I very much would have preferred it that way—not to know everything. Sometimes, you think—here I am, I survived…. But for what?

Only Nikushka… my girl. She’ll always need me.

You’re cold now? Well, that means we need to drink some more. My father-in-law used to say—“Let’s save ourselves… we’re getting sober!” Come on, don’t be shy…. Your health! Uff.

He was the one who rescued my family… saved it, I mean. My father-in-law. Nika was born later. If it hadn’t been for him, who knows how it all would have turned out. Such emptiness there was… like a black hole… such a dark stretch. At work—gloom, and at home—gloom. What’s the way out? What could there be? Once you’re in the system, you, my dear, have only two options—up or down! You don’t get a third choice. Those are the rules. Until then, things were going up for me, but when they head down—you whole life goes down the drain. And I was only thirty! And not a glimmer of light at home, I had nowhere to go. My better half was pissed at me. She was afraid they’d pack us off to the middle of nowhere, where she wouldn’t be able to buy the shearling coat she wanted… from our chancery—she’d just put her name on the waiting list for one. My father-in-law later shipped in a whole container of those shearlings from Afghanistan, but those weren’t the right kind for her, either, because everyone already had one like that—llama fur they were called, with those white tails like snot. Eh, why am I telling you this! All women are stupid. Sorry. That’s what I thought at the time. Meaning—that that’s what everyone’s life was like. I’d never met a different kind of woman. And they only showed the Decembrist wives in movies….

So that was when I met your mom. That was a first for me… in my experience. And, well, the last. After Stalin, they no longer used this method, but right at that time we got instructions to start again—“if the husband, then the wife”… one woman got time that way—her husband was sentenced for anti-Soviet agitation, and she went to visit him… to the camps. But—that was Fifth Department’s turf; I never touched anything like that. Our job was to prepare the soil for them, so to speak, yes, I knew which way the wind was blowing; I read the instructions, too. All such methods were first tried out with us in Ukraine, and only then expanded to the other republics… to the whole Union. Of course, it’s illegal, but what can you do? You got your orders from above—go execute them! That’s our job.

There was a time when this idea used to help me. Mobilized me. When I was young. Helped not to lose shape, not to start slipping… spinning. Not to think… maybe it would have been even better in the army. But—what’s the point now? It’s good things worked out the way they did. I am not complaining, and my conscience is clear.

Cognac for you? It’s good cognac, Transcarpathian. Good for the blood pressure… prevents hypertension.

Uff!

So peaceful out here! So quiet…

You know, I had never met a woman like your mother before. Or after. Sometimes, that’s the way it happens in life; there are such times when everything comes together at once, and it’s just one thing after another. I had just learned about my birth mother for the first time… and that she never told them who my father was… didn’t give them the name… and then, when I was working with your mother—I understood, finally, how that could be possible. I believed it. I believed that it could happen. And that you could take anything for having been loved like that… camps, prison, loony bin… everything! You don’t care. You could go out there onto the Senate Square, without a second thought—and be demoted for it, from officer to private. That’s why the Decembrists came out… that’s how they could do it. And I was inside a different system. From the day I was born—I was born in prison, wasn’t I? I knew how to put a person on his knees… before the whole class… I knew how to find people’s weak spots. I’m not just telling you this—I was talented; it wasn’t only the people who knew people who got promoted to captain by the time they were twenty-eight! But that’s another matter…. The way those men were loved—no one ever loved me like that. And no one would have waited for me.

That’s a big thing, you know—when someone is waiting for you…

He was lucky… your dad.

Ehh, Daryna Anatoliivna… I don’t want you to think that I… I thought so at the time. The older I get, the more I think about this. There was a movie back then, in the ’70s, about the Decembrists’ wives, do you remember? I forget what it was called. It had this actress in it, from Kyiv—Irina Kupchenko… she looked like your mom… I went to see the movie again, when it was in the second run, and I was at the archives already. But that’s another matter. Yes.

Beg pardon? Yes, they transferred me. Trusted me. That’s to my father’s credit—Boozerov’s; it’s all his effort. He renewed my… background purity, so to speak—went all the way to Moscow, to his postwar bosses… found everyone who was still alive—those who were informed of my… adoption. Up till then, my service record was spotless—until that museum. And who’d have thought—a museum! You’d think it’s a nice place… quiet, mostly female staff… and look how it turned out. So, I got transferred. From field operations, from working with people to working with documents. That was for the best, too, as it later turned out. In life, it’s often like this—you think: this is it, I’m done, and later you see—it’s even better. Because that was the second time in a row that I… my second failure, with your mom—right after that Jewish woman. Except that with your mom, I did it myself; I made the decision. I didn’t start the case on her, and wrote it like that in my report—that it would be a waste of resources, so to speak. Wrote up her profile. My boss read it—he got mad: “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Recommending her for the Communist Party?” But they put the brakes on it anyway, didn’t pursue it any further… changed their minds. And the hook was already cast…

Nikushka hadn’t been born yet then. She came later. And you were going to school already. You were such a skinny little thing, pale—I once saw your mom pick you up from school… I wouldn’t have recognized you now! No way. When I first saw you on TV, I thought—that can’t be right…

So, yeah, that’s how it goes.

You know, in the army things are simpler, they have a clear line: there’s home, and there’s work. And the aggression is strictly localized in time: at seven a.m.—drills, you screw up—get a boot in your face. Hic! Excuse me… so with my father-in-law you did better to leave him alone on weekend mornings. In NKVD, under Stalin, they worked nights—with the same idea—but in our times it no longer worked that way. My father, Boozerov—he was still old school… he fought the banderas, after all… fought with the dead, and it was to them he kept making his point for the rest of his life. Raised me to be meaner… but careers weren’t being made on aggression anymore; you didn’t get ahead by being mean. Knowing you had been chosen—that’s what kept you in the services! The feeling of being initiated… to the services… to the state’s holy of holies… a great state’s, one that makes the whole world tremble! The might! The mystery of power, as this one man said, a director of a Moscow institute, he came to speak to us recently… the mystery, yes! When you’re young, it’s hypnotizing; it can replace both home and family…. And then one blow like that—and you find yourself… naked. Naked. And you don’t, it turns out, want anything, nothing at all—only to be loved… for someone to be waiting for you… even to have you back from the loony bin. Hic! Knowing in what shape people came out of our loony bins and wanting you back anyway. I made sure I told her. Your matinka. I warned her…

Yes, I did.

Sometimes I wonder who he was, my father. My birth father, I mean…. Why did she love him so much? My mother? She could have survived… she was so young then; she wouldn’t even be eighty now… my mother-in-law’s eighty-two… she could have lived this long, too. How could she have done that? Sometimes you think—she was just foolish, a silly girl. She was too young; she didn’t understand… life… and then I remember your mom… Olga Fedorivna, yes, I remember. And? How did her life go… afterward?

Well… that’s good… good that it went well. Only, you know, when you have a daughter of your own… when you have your own children, you’ll understand me. It’s only in your movies that everything comes out so pretty. And I’ll tell you from my experience: as soon as you read a document that’s so pretty, so smooth, reads like Leo Tolstoy or something, not a word out of place—you should know it’s fake… it’s all fake, written for the reporting purposes. You can be ninety percent sure. Don’t think that as soon as you have a document in your hands, you’re done.

And you just wait, what’s your rush?…. They’re just starting to bite now…. Last Sunday I pulled a champ of a zander here, a twelve pounder! This big! Don’t worry, I won’t knock it over… let’s put it over here, that bottle, closer this way…. Hic! Excuse me.

Have a pickle, it’s homemade… my wife marinates them! You won’t find another one like it. She’s really stupid, of course, but runs a great house! Father-in-law’s schooling. And Nika takes after me. Thank God. Some girl I have, no? Knock on wood… she’s my blood!

My conscience is clear, Daryna Anatoliivna. And please don’t go enlisting me in the shtrafbat. You think I don’t understand? You think I’m too dumb to know? I’ve done my time, thank you. My father knew it too… Boozerov. He knew he got spat out. We all got spat out. Right, wrong… wherever you stood with the organization. All the same! Your father and mine, the same. Yes, the same! Only mine realized it first. Boozerov did. Long before the Union fell apart.

Hic! There’s water right by you, would you mind passing? No, I’m fine; it’s just to wash down my pill… thank you.

You know, I once heard this writer speak, she’s the one—forgot her name—who wrote about sex… under field conditions… some-thing like that. I don’t remember exactly the way she said it, but the main idea was that if you’re born in prison you grow up either prisoner or guard. No other choices, so to speak. And I disagree with that! I flat out disagree. I myself was born in prison—and what would have come of me if it weren’t for him… my father, the man who raised me?

No, you didn’t understand. Hic! You can’t just be so black and white…. What do you mean, either prisoner or guard? So what then, a whole generation is guilty merely by virtue of the time they were born? Those who survived—they’re guilty? And they should all have hung themselves… to come out clean, is that how it is? A noose around your neck—and you’re out? Then you’re a hero—fit for the movies? That’s what you’re doing, with your film, too. Okay, alright, I understand, let them be heroes—they fought… for Ukraine’s independence. We have independence now, times have changed—so we should honor them. Put up monuments and such… fine. But why do you insist on digging in these… deaths? On bringing back these death lovers? Is that a good example for the young people? Why do they need to know these things?

They need to live, Daryna Anatoliivna. Live! Not look back. You know what people say: the less you know, the better you sleep. I, for one, am very glad that Nika did not know old Boozerov while he was alive. My mom, our Grandma Dunya, may she rest in peace—she just bloomed after he died! Shed years. Lived another two decades. Raised Nika, had that joy in her old age… Nikushka loved her too. She’s always taking flowers to their graves at Lukyaniv cemetery… we all go, as a family… Memorial week, Victory Day… and the Cheka Officer’s Day, of course! I’ve given her what I could. She has what I didn’t have. My daughter grew up in normal family! Like regular people have. If it were up to me—I wouldn’t have told her anything at all, let her think she is Boozerova, like her grandparents. But my mother-in-law just had to get in there, the snake… and what would you have me do? Tell my child that her birth grandmother hung herself in prison after three men raped her during an interrogation?

Yes, she did. Hung herself. In her cell, on her own braid. Hic! Used her braid to… strangle herself. I myself didn’t know until a couple years ago. I dug it out… spent twenty years digging—to find that. Was that a good idea? You tell me, was it?

They were men from the front, my dear, men from the front…. You’ve got to understand. It was okay with German women in ’45; war wrote it all off. And the banderas—they were basically considered as good as the Nazis: the Ukrainian-German nationalists, that’s what they called them. The Germans had Ukrainian-Jewish nationalists and we had Ukrainian-German ones. That’s the lot she drew… my Jewish mom. If not Jewish during the war, then—sign here, please!—you’re German afterward. And no one told her, poor girl, not to aggravate young men who’d conquered half of Europe, went all the way to Berlin! Wrote their names on the Reichstag. You know what the biggest thing was my father—Boozerov—saw written on a Reichstag wall? Letters this big! Excuse my language, I’ll say it as it was: I FUCK YOU ALL!

Uff. Don’t worry, alcohol has no effect on me. Sometimes I wish it did, I think to myself—what a waste…

What did you think was going to happen? That I’d find piece of paper for you—and you’d have it all? They don’t write things like that on those pieces of paper, my dear…

The investigator? He was disciplined, yes. And those other two, as well. All got demoted in rank… for two months. A suicide in prison—that’s a severe breach, worse than an escape. How did she pull that off? A perfect escape. Escaped from me, too… my own mother. Like in that song: “Dearest mother of mi-ne, tell me why you aren’t sle-eping….” Sorry… if only I knew where she’s buried, I’d have carved these words on her tombstone.

And you come to me to see about your relative’s grave. A grave! Where they took bodies from prisons, where they buried them—who’s going to tell you? Those who did the burying are not talking… if they’re still alive. There was this veteran, from Russia—he came out not long ago—he was on the team that processed Shukhevych’s body after the MGB killed him. A special operation; the team got extra leave afterward. They took the body out, burned it, and spread the ashes—in a forest, overlooking the Zbruch river. There was no trace left to be found! Do you understand? No trace at all, and that’s how they do it now, too… in Chechnya: after they secure a place—total erasure. You won’t find anything! And I won’t find out either… where my own mother was buried. So now what? Huh? You can’t tell me… I’ll tell you! I will. When you have your own children—you’ll understand. Because a child needs to have a… a place, a memorial, a cemetery in the city, where she can go when all her friends go with their parents and then talk about it at school. It’s not like she’s from somewhere else—she’s a Kyivite. These are her roots, basically. If you have graves—you have roots. Grandfather, grandmother. Everything I didn’t have—I’ve given her. My daughter is not an orphan! When she was little, I showed her the portrait on the headstone, taught her to say, Grandpa, Grandpa—she still says it like that. And God forbid… God forbid… Hic! Excuse me. No, I’m just… something in my throat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there anything left? In that bottle?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, so…

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

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

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

The documents are gone, long gone. I checked.

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

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

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

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

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

“I should have known it right away. From the first time I saw her. I can’t believe how stupid I am.”

“What are you talking about?”

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

“I wonder—did Granny Lina know?”

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

“You women are something else.”

“Why?”

“Nothing… it never ceases to amaze me.”

“What about it? It’s very simple, really. Elementary, my dear Watson.”

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

“A fantastic granny you had. A beast!”

“Beast?”

“Yep. She’s the one I should be making a film about, only no one would appreciate her quiet heroism, the feminine heroism—there’s nothing spectacular about it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not KGB—SBU.”

“Same shit.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My dad. Your mom.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yep. Sounds about right.”

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

“Why do you ask?”

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

“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

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

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

“Me? Of him? You’re crazy!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Honestly, no.”

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

“Draw three different views, from three sides?”

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

“Meaning what?”

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

“Weird…”

“No shit.”

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

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

“You goof… that’s who you are.”

“I’m not sure, baby. I’m not sure.”

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

“Hm. You think?”

“Can’t you feel it yourself?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

“His dam will break too, one day… and sweep away the whole house of cards he’s worked so hard to build around his child. It’s leaking already—first his mother-in-law, then it’ll be something else: the further his child ventures into the world, the more risks there are. That’s why he’s so afraid.”

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

“Why? You disagree?”

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

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

“You just keep kissing up to me…”

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

“Shut up. You’re mean.”

“But wise—you said so yourself.”

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

“You poor thing. Take an Advil.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Oy!”

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

“My dictaphone!”

“What about it?”

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

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

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

“No shi—”

CLICK.

Daryna is sitting on the edge of the bathtub holding the test stick in her fingers—carefully, like a rare insect, a wingless dragonfly with a delicate blue fuselage. She sits and looks, unable to take her eyes off of it: to her, the strip seems to be alive. About to move. Or do something else to reveal itself, something completely unpredictable. Especially since, as the instructions claim, after ten minutes, the reading can disappear. Still, what she is seeing is beyond doubt.

It is real. It exists.

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

Over 99% accuracy.

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

But two is how many there are.

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

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

It is.

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

And instantly feels terrified.

Who are you?

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

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

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

Of her child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A family now. Forever.

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

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

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

And now she has it inside her.

Hello, then.

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

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

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

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

Here’s the answer. In her hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what was tormenting her.

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

They, the dead, helped her.

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

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

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

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

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

Well then, hello.

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

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

“Hullo, honey.”

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

“Hi, Antosha. Glad to hear from you.”

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

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

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

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

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

“A decent living?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nice. I’ll have to remember that.”

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

“That bad, huh?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, I did.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So what, you looking for a job?”

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

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

“Where’d you hear that, Antosha?”

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

“I do.”

“You witch,” Antosha drops his second compliment in a row, with genuine pleasure, like a dollop of cream into her coffee. “And what are you going to do with it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For real?”

“Uhu.”

“Get out. How’d you find out?”

“From the son of the old GB man who was in charge of the raid.”

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

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

“Wow. Where did you find this guy?”

“Right here in Kyiv.”

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

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

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

“I…”

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

“No, he refused. It was a private conversation.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I can still manage the travel, Antosha.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course,” Antosha agrees.

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

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

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

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

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

“Uhu.”

“You were holding it, you know. The lantern. And one could see there were people in this country…. And now all you see is shit crawling out from the woodwork and nothing else. Why should it be so, Dara? Why are they always putting us down? All the time, look at any time in history, it’s the same thing all over again—someone’s stomping us into shit, so deep we can’t even see ourselves. Is that some fucking karma we got, or what?”

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

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

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

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

“About betrayal? But we still don’t know the identity of the man who led the raid to the bunker; we only have our speculations—so whose betrayal, which?”

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

“So when are you starting?”

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

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

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

“For real? How could that have happened?”

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

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

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

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

“Look.” She touches his elbow.

“At what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXT. CITY – NIGHT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Coming, Gran!”

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

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