2006
The director of the company spread out on the table the stack of family photographs I’d brought. I hadn’t prepared, and never would have suspected that I’d have to review the photos in the actual job interview. I hadn’t seen any pictures of my father in years.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked, which was when I realized that I’d covered my mouth with my hand.
“I just miss him,” I said, taking the proffered handkerchief. This sentimentality surprised even me. I was embarrassed. Why hadn’t I prepared for this better? I’d made my mother collect the photos, claiming that when I was abroad, I’d wished I’d had a family album. Mom probably thought I was planning to move. She tried to ask me about it, but I quickly shoved the photographs in my bag and slipped out. I trusted that my mother wouldn’t choose anything that would distress her daughter. Like funeral pictures. At least I didn’t see any of those in front of me.
“Your father died in some sort of accident…was that it?”
The director spent another moment inspecting the photographs like a bad hand of cards, then she went to a cupboard to retrieve a bottle and two glasses, along with a box of chocolates. Focusing on the weight of the crystal in my hand and the cognac burning away the tightness that had formed in my throat, I ordered myself to get it together. I’d screwed up: I hadn’t given a thought to how my father would look to a stranger’s eyes. When he died, I was fourteen, and it felt like I was fourteen again, at the mine where my dad had taken me. In the topmost shot, a group of men who had just finished their shift were smoking, bright sparks burning in their black fingers. In the background was the old bathtub used to hoist them out of the hole. Someone sat unwrapping his toe-rags and grinning with a row of shining teeth. They all looked the same under a layer of coal dust, except for my father, his face gleaming clean in the center like a full moon—he was the only one lacking the third eye of a headlamp.
There was another photo from the same time. In it, my father stood next to a man I didn’t recognize, who wore a leather jacket. The smiles of a deal well done caressed their cheeks. Behind them stood two vans, Bukhankas, and amid all the gray, black, and brown gleamed a chaffinch egg–blue ZiL truck.
In the most recent photo, my father had a couple of days of stubble and wore only a sleeveless undershirt. Its yellowed piping hung slack. In his fingers lolled a cigarette in a holder, and his elbows rested on the kitchen table. On the windowsill, tomato seedlings in need of thinning grew wild, the sticks holding them up bent and helpless. Between an open bottle of pickles and an enamel bowl filled to overflowing with boiled potatoes stood an unlabeled vodka bottle. The mood was despondent, the heavy glass ashtray barely visible under the mound of ashes, the matchbox empty. There were three glasses but no sign of visitors. I recognized the waxed tablecloth and the wall of our house, its canned pea–green color. I couldn’t figure out who had taken the picture or why. Where was the father I remembered with the manner of an owner and the nonchalance of a moneymaker? The man in this picture was tired, sties and life weighing down his gaze. No sign of his youthful good looks remained, not even a hint.
The director pushed the pictures back.
“Your mother is good proof that being photogenic is something you inherit, as was your father when he was younger. What happened after that? And what about Snizhne!”
“We didn’t actually live there.”
“Your résumé says that you went to school there.”
“Only for a little while.”
“But your father was from Snizhne, as were his parents. Why on earth did you move there? From Tallinn, in the nineties no less?”
The director shook her head. This clearly made her doubt the intellectual gifts of my family, as it did me. It had been stupid then, and I was still paying for it. Leaving my aunt’s house no longer seemed likely. I hadn’t been able to prepare mentally for the job I was applying for because I didn’t know what it entailed. However, as the interview progressed, I began to understand what was going on and why Snizhne mattered.
“Your chest X-rays,” the director said. “What do they show?”
I frowned in confusion, though I already sensed what she meant. My father stared back at me from the table. He had developed the early pictures of himself, and their edges curled like birch bark. Some of the shots had triangular brackets still stuck to them from where my mother had removed them from her own photo album.
“Once we had a client who was a Ukrainian-American environmental researcher who wanted a donor from her family’s home region in Donbas, Stakhanov, right next door to Snizhne,” the director said. “In the end he changed his mind and chose a girl from the least polluted oblast in the Soviet Union—not in Ukraine. He wanted to avoid risky material. Some Western clients are extremely environmentally conscious. If they start doing searches about Snizhne, the results won’t be good. Want to try it yourself?”
The display of the desktop computer rotated toward me.
“Look.”
The director typed in a few words, and the screen flooded with views that would startle anyone. Just like those final photos of my dad.
“Our office specializes in serving foreigners, and images like this don’t give a good first impression. They arouse suspicions that our girls are motivated by money rather than the calling. Snizhne comes across as a poor, desperate city.”
I was already halfway out of my chair when the director started to talk about the agency’s future prospects. Apparently, the interview wasn’t over yet. She had just wanted to put me in my place by making clear the factors that reduced my market value. Now, instead of presenting more harsh realities, it was time for a relaxed account of how the director had begun her business in the great cities of the Soviet Union, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv, where she had found skilled workers eager for jobs because the collapse of the empire also meant a crash in specialist employment. Her plans had been received with joy, delighting even the ordinary person on the street—because of her, the entire medical profession had not vanished into the West. Listening to her, my interest in the job began to grow beyond the pay. I was fascinated by this woman, by her talent, which it was impossible not to admire, and by her ability to seize the opportunities she encountered. It was in that moment that my faith in her was born. I wanted to be like her.
“Did you know that the first test-tube baby in the CIS was born in Kharkiv? Our medical staff and researchers are world class. But do you think that’s enough for Western clients? Of course not. So, we have to change the way we work,” she said. “They ask about groundwater, pollution, problems from the mines and their hereditary impacts. On the other hand, we don’t have to build bomb shelters for the nitrogen tanks, like we did for the Russians. In our Kyiv office we don’t need anything like that, because there our new clientele is made up mainly of Westerners, and they’re our primary target group.”
I considered how I could improve my position.
“You would probably get pretty good image search results for Dnipro,” I suggested cautiously. “This is a great city and always has been.”
I was still afraid that my years in Snizhne might show in any blood tests, chest X-rays, or other tests I knew nothing about, and this job might remain a dream. There was no rational basis for this fear—I just didn’t have time to think the matter through. The coordinator I’d spoken with on the phone had gushed about my pictures. I’d thought I might be paid immediately and would return to the countryside in triumph, just to tell my mother that they wouldn’t need a loan from Ivan. My options were limited. I could look for a man with an open wallet, but that would take time, and I’d already had enough of Western jackasses during my years as a model. Then I remembered dimly that I might know something that could increase my value. Something that would make this woman understand that I was a good fit for this profession.
“I received my vaccinations properly. Back in Tallinn.”
“What do you mean?”
“The prequalification form didn’t ask about it, and no one has requested my vaccination certificate. But they should have. It means I’m a suitable surrogate if not a donor.”
The woman’s eyes blinked a few extra times. This hadn’t occurred to her. Maybe I still had a chance. If not here, I would search for another agency, knowing now what kinds of applicants they preferred. I would avoid anything related to Snizhne and would wipe that from my personal history. Or I could find a less exclusive agency. They had to exist.
“If you haven’t had any problems with vaccinations, you’re lucky,” I said and nodded at my father’s picture. “His friend was involved in the vaccine business. Donbas girls aren’t risky material because of the pollution but because the locals are skeptical of vaccinations, and half of the children in the area don’t receive them. And then there are others who get the same stick too many times because the schools got into the business, too. What could be the consequences of receiving the rubella vaccine every school year? Or what if an unvaccinated donor comes down with a disease in the middle of the process? You probably know how poorly rubella mixes with pregnancy.”
The director pursed her lips and looked at me with new eyes.
“You’re a smart girl,” she said, and I caught a glimpse of one of her canine teeth with a beauty mark–sized smudge of lipstick on it. She smiled at me and at the possibilities, and I prayed in my mind to the Holy Mother of God. This had to work.
“We’ll have to come up with a way to handle your dad. And Snizhne. That needs to disappear. We’ll have to find another home for your father’s parents. You went to Paris from Tallinn, right? Just like Carmen Kass?”
I didn’t understand what she was getting at. I knew who Kass was, of course. An agent from Milan had found her in the Kaubamaja department store in Tallinn. She had been luckier in her modeling career than I was. Or smarter.
We went through everything that was good to share. If clients asked about Chornobyl, I should mention that I lived with my family in Tallinn at the time of the accident. From there, my parents had later moved to Mykolaiv, nearer to my father’s sister since she wasn’t up to caring for their elderly parents alone. Because I couldn’t show the more recent pictures of my father, we moved his death to a year when he still looked presentable. My cousin who died in the Afghan War was left in the family tree but not the fact that my aunt had gone crazy after receiving her son in a zinc coffin with worms slithering out of the gaps in the seal. Clients were interested in three successive generations, and so it was best if there were no unnatural deaths, or any diseases that could be seen as genetic, either physical or mental.
“If any of your relatives are in prison, you should tell me now.”
“But imprisonment isn’t hereditary.”
“Aggressiveness is. And you shouldn’t tell that joke to any clients.”
I knew what she meant. Around here, the honest people are in prison, and the liars are in parliament.
When I asked if this meant a new family tree had to be pulled out of a hat for every Ukrainian, I received a bright shower of laughter in return, accompanied by a clicking of fingernails on the tabletop that sounded like summer rain.
“Westerners don’t know how to think that way. A donor’s father has to have a legal job. I won’t even ask what your father’s accident was or where it happened. Our kopankas don’t fit into their worldview. That was where your father worked, right, at an illegal mine?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“And prison? What about that?”
“My dad managed to die before he ended up behind bars.”
“You aren’t the first miner’s daughter to come talk to me, nor the first whose family’s livelihood comes from kopankas.”
I understood very well that my father’s story was ill suited for my portfolio if I wanted well-paying clients. There was no room here for drunkenness, for suicides, assisted or genuine, let alone for illegal coal mining or poppy plantations.
“Let’s forget all that and concentrate on finding the right education for you. A couple of years of comprehensive school isn’t enough, so what if you left modeling to study and graduated from the Kyiv National Linguistic University?”
I had passed the test. I was approved. My new boss called me a window-dressing girl and wanted me to move to Kyiv, where we could serve Western clients better, and she even promised me an advance. I could give my mother money, and I would get my own apartment, my own bathroom, running water again, and a new phone to replace the one I had, which was on its last legs. I could look forward to restaurant food, espresso, and the life of an adult instead of a failure to launch. The boss arranged papers that said I taught English and French, which was completely believable given the language skills I’d picked up out in the world, and according to my payroll statements, I taught private evening language lessons. An account statement purchased from a bank was necessary for the visas. The balance shown on it made me laugh in disbelief. I was beginning to look perfect, and so was my father. His records were changed to depict a construction worker who had died in an accident on a job site, and his final employer became a contracting company in Mykolaiv. According to my boss, the company was a reliable partner in situations where girls’ personal information needed a little aesthetic enhancement. So Snizhne was erased from my family history as if none of us had ever even visited.
I’d been ready for anything, but now I rejoiced: I was able to keep my liver and kidneys and didn’t have to knock on the doors of any more bride agencies. Compared to that, donating a few eggs was ridiculously effortless.
I didn’t tell anyone about the donations. And no one asked later how I’d ended up in the industry. My boss sometimes said she’d snapped me up in an instant once she realized how sharp, cosmopolitan, and skilled at languages I was, and everyone immediately assumed I’d started out in the office as a coordinator. My donations were irrelevant and, as I progressed in my career, I came to believe that telling anyone about them would have knocked me down to the same level as the girls. I would lose my position of authority.
I didn’t lie to you deliberately. I considered these embellishments to be harmless cosmetic corrections of the sort everyone made.