Today was the day: Emily would write up her thesis, confront her advisor and finally decide whether to start the Ph.D. and be locked in Toronto for the next four to eight years, working on the same things. If she hadn’t been fired yet, that is. She got to work. She had four days left, she could do this.
First she organized her books and notes on the table. Then she put Jazzy in the chair next to her. Then she breathed in coffee. She closed her eyes, and graphs and diagrams formed and disinte-grated like images in a kaleidoscope, social networks sticky like spiderwebs, forming and pinching off again. Many of the people she’d interviewed didn’t know most of the people on their own social networks, not even enough to remember why they’d added most of them in the first place. So Emily had established that people tended to connect themselves to acquaintances and friends of friends. That information travelled through these circuits seemed beside the point. People learned things from bus stop posters too, from graffiti on bathroom walls. She’d counted who clicked on the same links, read the same online articles, attended the same seminars. Nobody seemed to remember enough about any of those things to prove they’d been influenced at all. The numbers looked good though. Everyone agreed on that. Everyone had been impressed by her statistics. None of this belonged in her introduction though.
She sighed, watched coffee eddy around her breath. The beginning of university had been better than this, that could be the end of it. She remembered when she first lived in residence, the shock, the strangeness. One night after a class, she’d walked down to the laundry room, bought a stale sandwich from a vending machine and sat eating it, watching the dryers spin. Those were just the slack hours before time would pull taught again, but things felt different now. She might not be able to finish her thesis now that she was adding more stuff every day, and why couldn’t she stop adding things? What if she did finish her thesis, and nobody cared about what she’d found? What if they figured out that those numbers didn’t mean anything and called her a fraud? She couldn’t fool everyone forever, that she knew for sure.
She opened her eyes. Technically, she couldn’t be allowed a morning off her thesis since she hadn’t started working yet. She opened her email. There was a message from Russell, so she upgraded yesterday’s report. What had seemed like food poisoning was now the flu.
Then there was another email, a message from the cemetery men. It had a link to a page of pictures, to hundreds of image files.
She opened the first picture, labelled Cemetery 001. It showed the graveyard in a dreary bloom. That wasn’t how she’d pictured Russia. There were dark things everywhere, mosses and creeper vines. The tombstone itself was damp, dry only in places, like the stone itself was weeping. The Cyrillic name on the grave wasn’t visible, but the cemetery men had inserted a text box at the bottom of the image, with the name written twice, once in Cyrillic and once in English. It wasn’t a name that Emily recognized.
There were over three hundred pictures to go.
Emily hid behind the door to the kitchen and peeked inside. Jonah was there, alone. “Hey,” she whispered.
He looked up, his face filling with colour. “I was looking for you earlier,” he said.
“I got an email back from the cemetery men. They sent hundreds of photographs.”
Emily scrolled from picture to picture, watching Jonah’s reaction more than the pictures themselves, and so found herself scrolling back again, apologetic. She’d forgotten to read the names.
“Don’t worry,” said Jonah. “I’ve been having trouble too. There’s a lot of graves.”
“Yeah,” and Emily suddenly remembered her grandma Ayala’s grave. She’d seen it last when she was eight, when her parents and relatives had taken turns shovelling in dirt. Emily had to scroll back once more. That’s when she fell on a Robert. She stopped. It said Robert Baruch. The next one was Dimitri Baruch, and the next was Johannes. All her great-great-uncles, Papa Sam’s brothers, but with Doran’s last name. She looked up, and saw what must be a mirror of her own appalled expression.
“It’s a coincidence,” said Jonah, but the next grave said Israel Baruch, all the brothers now, side by side. The dates read 1929, around the time her family had left.
Emily slammed her laptop shut.
“I’m sure this doesn’t mean anything,” said Jonah, leaning forward. “Except what does that mean?”
“Could he be related?” breathed Emily. “Could his family have all changed their names?”
“People did that. To sound less Jewish.”
“Except that Doran is pretty adamantly not Jewish. And the new name sounds more Jewish. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. And Sonja is always looking through his keyhole when he’s dressing for dinner.”
“And creeping into his room late at night.”
“She doesn’t know they’re related.”
“Maybe they’re not,” said Jonah. “Could Sonja have been adopted? She has a completely different complexion from Blima.”
“But they have the exact same face,” said Emily. “They both look exactly like Ayala.”
“We need to translate the letter,” said Jonah.