2009
Only Boris came to meet me in the yard, and for a moment I wondered where the others were. However, I assumed that dinner preparations were keeping my mother busy, and I didn’t give the matter any more thought, because Boris couldn’t hide his curiosity about the gifts I’d brought. I gave him a new winter coat straight from the trunk of the car, and after he ran inside to show off his present, I stayed to pet the dog and smoke a cigarette. I was already starting to regret that I hadn’t gone with you to Vienna, since the agency had been forced to shut down because of the swine flu pandemic. The countryside was depressing at this time of year, the trees bony without their leaves, and the stork nest looked like a black hole in the darkening sky.
When I stepped onto the porch, I realized that something was wrong. No one greeted me, and the quick nods were like pecks. My aunt’s and mother’s gazes swept past me coldly like alcohol evaporating from my skin, and the house didn’t smell like fresh rolls, it smelled of valerian root. Setting my bag on the floor, I glanced at the cold stove. I tried to ask how they were, but no one replied, and I left the rest of my gifts packed. The atmosphere was dismal, as if there were a dead body in the house. Boris perched at the table in his new coat, inspecting the hand-painted flowers on the side of a drinking glass. Not even he looked at me, instead just gazing at each brushstroke in turn, and then moved on to a teacup and its flowers, its gilded patterns, the brushstrokes, following it with his fingers, until he slipped out after my aunt as she went to feed the chickens, the porcelain cup still firmly gripped in his hand while the other clutched his coat as if someone had threatened to take it from him.
The mood was tense when my mother and I were left alone, and I expected I would now receive an explanation for her behavior. It had to be something serious. One of them must have a fatal disease. Or someone we knew had died suddenly. I couldn’t imagine that it had something to do with the newspaper protruding from her pocket, which she now spread out on the table, still without a word. I recognized the picture printed on the page from an orphanage opening. I remembered the event well—the ceremonial cutting of the ribbon had fallen to Viktor. And there I stood smiling next to the Kravetses, the picture framed by girls with hair ribbons tied in bows. The caption listed all of our names. Veles had come to lend his support to his son, who was taking his first steps into politics, which was why he had agreed to the rare father-son photo op.
“Do you know who that man is?”
My mother pointed at Veles. Turning my head toward the window, I picked the matches up off the table. My mother sounded strange, as if speaking was difficult because she was chewing on barley grits. Then I dropped the matchbox. I had been shaking it, unconsciously. My mother’s finger was still pointing at Veles, and it was the finger of a prophet standing in judgment, calling down destruction.
“How can you work for the Man from Donetsk?”
I didn’t understand what she was talking about. I knew the Man from Donetsk, but only from old rumors. He had been my father and Maxim Sokolov’s business partner before things went bad. Someone had been feeding my mother some very strange nonsense.
“Are you claiming that Vitali Kravets is the Man from Donetsk? What kind of joke is this supposed to be?” I asked with perfect self-assurance. “Vitali Kravets is from Dnipro.”
I was laughing, but my mother wasn’t. Picking up a glass, she poured in some Korvalol and then splashed some water on top. After draining the glass, she crossed her arms, and her dirt-stained fingernails seemed to dig into the fabric of her coatdress as if she had to restrain herself. In my stomach I felt an unpleasant twinge. As if she hadn’t made a mistake. As if I had.
“I never saw the Man from Donetsk, not even a glimpse of him. And as far as I know, you didn’t meet him either. Or did you?” I asked. I had to make her understand how insane this claim was. “And did Dad talk about him to you? Did he mention his name? Did we have photographs of him? Do you know what he looked like?”
“Valentina Sokolova knew him and recognized him from that picture.”
“Daria’s mother? Is she who you’ve been talking to?”
“Valentina could never forget that braggart even if he’s traded in his running shoes for hand-stitched Italian leather.”
Instinctively I felt for the phone in my pocket. Daria had tried to call me a dozen times, and I had assumed she just wanted medicine for herself or her friends. The flu raging in the country had emptied the pharmacy shelves and all the bins of lemons and garlic in the stores. I hadn’t answered. Pointing fingers wasn’t enough for my mother anymore. Now she struck the newspaper with her fist. The Man from Donetsk. Vitali Kravets. Veles. Your boss.
“This man learned of your father’s and Max’s intentions. This man found out who they were trying to cheat. That they were trying to cheat him. That was why your father and Max were killed.”
“Wait a minute. When did Dad tell you about his plans? You two barely saw each other during those years. How can you believe everything you’re being fed? Is this newspaper supposed to be proof?”
“Valentina knew everything. Max was always running at the mouth. He could never keep a secret, unlike your father,” my mother said. “Unlike you.”
As I lit a cigarette, I noticed that my hand was shaking. This must be a misunderstanding. It had to be. Valentina Sokolova was lying. I couldn’t think of a reason, though. Had someone paid her? Or was age playing tricks on her memory? My father. Daria’s father. Your boss. There are no half measures for Veles. That’s what you said. My thoughts were still a big tangled dog rose bush, but in the middle of it something loomed that I couldn’t quite formulate. Something I had forgotten. Something I should remember. Something that would help me grasp what had happened. I couldn’t put my finger on the phrase, though. On your phrase. Instead, I latched onto your voice, which was winding its way somewhere through the thicket of my mind, and I reached toward it until it was as bright as the whistle of a train at night in Dnipro, and the words were clear, and they included the name Donetsk, and they were from a conversation when you were talking about your boss’s wedding. Now I remembered everything.
We both had a full day off, and you took me to Bartolomeo, where I’d never been before. The hotel’s private beach was wonderful. I hadn’t known it was possible to find a Caribbean experience on the shores of the Dnieper, or to get such unbelievably good coffee in the city. If I hadn’t seen the high-priced escorts in the club, I’d have thought it was a perfect place for client meetings. You apologized: you would have brought me to Bartolomeo earlier if you’d known its pirate ship milieu would appeal to me so much. So I stopped my gushing. I didn’t want to ruin an exceptionally talkative moment for you, and I was thinking the whole time about what Maria Kirillovna had said. Maybe she’d been mistaken. I didn’t want to be the woman who spent her days waiting to be proposed to, and yet I found myself doing precisely that. It was embarrassing. You sighed and said that if you were going to arrange a wedding celebration for yourself and your betrothed, you would choose something simpler, and I smiled, because just then you took my hand and kissed it, and because I was interpreting your words through the conversation I’d had with Maria Kirillovna, even though what you were saying was right in line with the purpose of the day: as we were enjoying ourselves, we were also seeing if this place would be suitable for celebrating your boss and Maria Kirillovna’s wedding anniversary. After we ordered our food, you told me more specifically about your assignment. Your father had served as the master of ceremonies when Veles married Maria Kirillovna, a member of the Dnipro elite, and you were to continue the tradition by organizing this party, the details of which you wanted my opinion on. Maria Kirillovna would want nothing less than a confetti drop, the fireworks of the century, and acrobat girls walking on wooden stilts. When I began asking follow-up questions, I referred to the party as a silver wedding anniversary, and you corrected me. This would be their steel anniversary—the eleventh. Maria Kirillovna wouldn’t be happy about my mistake and could take it as an insult to her age, so I had best remember it correctly. I muttered something vague, asking whether celebrating steel anniversaries on this scale was some new fad. It wasn’t. Maria Kirillovna had read a list of different anniversaries and got excited. She thought it was best to celebrate when you still had the energy, and a steel wedding anniversary party sounded good to her. It was just like them. I’d imagined they had been married for decades, and I held up Maria Kirillovna as an example of a woman who would never become a widow. Only eleven years together shook my faith in that. The revelation confused me, but I didn’t have a chance to wonder about Viktor’s birth year before you clarified that Viktor was from Veles’s first marriage, which had ended so badly that the woman’s name had become taboo. Not even Viktor had any contact with his biological mother anymore. The divorce was likely the result of an indiscretion with one of Veles’s old friends, though that was only your own interpretation. Once, a childhood acquaintance of Veles had run into you while drunk, and he’d referred to this woman in vulgar terms: the bitch should have picked someone else to screw. I wasn’t paying any attention to the details of the divorce, since I was still perplexed by Maria Kirillovna’s steel anniversary party, the guest list for which the Kravetses were currently pondering. Every big shot in Dnipro would be there, you said, and there would likely be a dustup about whether to invite anyone from Donetsk or not. The mention of Donetsk made me perk up and focus on the conversation, and I threw a scarf over my shoulders. I asked what Donetsk had to do with it, and you reminded me that the Donetsk and Dnipro clans were competitors. Veles still had financial interests in his old home region, but otherwise he had shaken the dust of the entire oblast from his feet after marrying one of Dnipro’s finest. He had no desire to return to Donetsk even by association, which doubtless also had to do with his ex-wife. The sophisticated Maria Kirillovna had done Veles good, you said. Veles had become as elegant as any businessman in Dnipro, who used cunning more than brute force to advance his business interests. Some had probably hoped that the alliance would improve relations between the Dnipro and Donetsk factions. That hadn’t happened, though, and you didn’t believe there would ever be perfect agreement about who should be invited. Drawing up a guest list would definitely be much easier for us, you said, and I instantly forgot everything else I had just heard.
Daria’s mother’s memory had not failed her. Mine had. Veles had left Donetsk in the late nineties, and Valentina had recognized him. There was sufficient evidence of his identity, and I could no longer believe it was all a coincidence, which sapped my desire to crush my mother’s claims. Your boss was the Man from Donetsk with whom our stupid fathers had done their stupid business. The man my father had always gone to and whom our industrious fathers had cheated. The man from under whose nose I’d stolen a stock certificate list, which I gave to my father for a hundred dollars, even though it belonged to the three of them, the three friends, who were friends no longer once my father and Maxim Sokolov decided to take over that ridiculous factory on their own.
I stared at the dry breadcrumbs lying on the wax cloth and then slowly stood and walked out. After gaining the shelter of the apple trees, I shoved my scarf as far down my throat as I could and screamed into it until I nearly fainted, and then, retching, I tugged the fabric out of my mouth. The instant I’d escaped my mother’s gaze, my determined hauteur shattered like glass that couldn’t stand up to heat. My father had made his choice. He’d chosen business and fraud as his guiding star. Not me. Not my mother. Not us. We were never a priority, so why should I mourn what my heart had chosen? What did it matter that my choice fell on someone who was like a family member to the man who had severed my father’s head?
I kicked a rotting apple that lay on the ground and made my decision. I would think about this now. I would think about it for this allotted time, and then I would swat it away like a mosquito and never trouble myself with it again, ever. I would not let my father ruin what we had. I wouldn’t agree to that. And I couldn’t let my nerve fail if I intended to clear up this mess.
Wiping my nose with a towel drying on the clothesline, I tried to regain my ability to function. I would start by listening to the messages Daria had left on my answering machine. There were dozens of missed calls, and I cursed my indifference to her. As I stared at the phone screen, it began to flash. You were trying to call. My gaze rose to scan the dark, silent garden, where the ringtone was as lurid as the cry of a peacock. For a moment, I imagined I could see you deep in the orchard. It was as if you’d heard what my mother and I had been discussing in the kitchen and were waiting, curious to hear what explanations I thought I could use to get out of this fix. Dropping the phone in my pocket, I crouched next to the dog, which had been watching my strange behavior. Its tail wagged, and it didn’t growl. Still, the feeling of being watched remained. It was so bad that I had to circle the garden, each shadow making me sweat and every gooseberry or caramel bush that caught on my clothing making me jump. I was surrounded by thorns. But there was no one in the garden. Finally, I ran to the gate with the dog following. I had to see the other side of the fence. The road was empty. You didn’t know. I had to remember that. You had reviewed Daria’s papers, and you’d seen her father’s name. If you hadn’t recognized it or the man himself from the old pictures included in her donor folder, Veles had buried his past in Donetsk so deeply that you didn’t have a clue about the incident, and that gave me hope. Veles hadn’t wanted any daylight shone on it, not even for his closest men. If I made sure that the Sokolovs kept their mouths shut, the whole thing would be forgotten again.
In the messages Daria had left on my phone, she was panting and saying something about strangers coming into her home. We had to talk about what the men had said. I could tell from her voice that something was wrong. She didn’t accuse me of working for the enemy, she didn’t spit sulfurous vituperations at me, and she didn’t specify what was going on. All through the night, she’d left messages with the same basic content. In the meantime, I’d been dreaming zephyr-sweet dreams, and after waking up, I’d thought how lovely it would be to have my wedding photos taken in a park full of fall colors with the Potemkin Palace in the background. I was an idiot. My mother would never come to my wedding. The Man from Donetsk would come with his wife. And there would be no marriage if I didn’t find a way to keep my house of cards intact. Leaning my back against an apple tree, I looked at the windows with light flooding out of them from inside. No one was calling for me as I might have hoped. Not my mother. Not my aunt. Not even Boris. The only one treating me with sympathy was the dog at my feet, who nuzzled me attentively and licked the scratches on my fingers. Taking a deep breath, I called Daria. She didn’t answer. I selected Valentina Sokolova’s number. The phone rang and rang. Then I sent Daria a gentle encouragement to contact me as soon as possible and listened to the messages again in case I had overlooked something. I couldn’t deduce from them what Daria knew. However, I assumed that the men who had barged into Daria’s home were responsible for this whole unraveling. Confused by the news, Daria had wanted an explanation from me. Instead of making up a story about a misunderstanding and silencing her, I had ignored her calls. She’d spoken to her mother, who had confirmed at least the part of the intruders’ report about Maxim and my father, as well as the identity of the Man from Donetsk. In shock, Valentina had blabbed everything to my mother as well. Of course, this was all just guesswork. I couldn’t know what had really happened in Daria’s home, what the visitors had told her or why. I stood up. I had to return to Dnipro as soon as possible. I would find Daria and fix this. But before that, I would have to ask my mother some questions.
Mom was still sitting at the kitchen table staring straight ahead. Her mottled hands rested motionless on that damn newspaper like an old Eternit fiber cement roof, and there was something final about her pose. I couldn’t stand to look at her.
“You can’t believe all of that based solely on the Sokolovs’ rubbish,” I said. “Seriously.”
“Daria sent her mother evidence from your work.”
“Sent? What do you mean ‘sent’? Have you seen what she supposedly sent?”
“Don’t start with me. Why would the Sokolovs lie about such a thing?”
Our agency’s documents revealed to whom Daria gave her child. That was the only record of Viktor’s name and the name of his father, who had acted as his donor. I was guessing Daria had received this information from those uninvited guests, who had also probably brought evidence of the business dealings between Maxim, my father, and Veles Kravets, or at least the connection between them. Daria still should have kept quiet, though, because we’d concealed the true nature of her work from her family. No one should know to whom she’d donated eggs. She had made a different choice, though, shamelessly blabbing everything to her mother.
“Didn’t I ask you to get Daria work as a model? What happened? What’s wrong with you?”
I didn’t understand the finality of my mother’s words, because instead of going to my car, I went to the bedroom as if I was still staying the night. All of my pictures had disappeared. In their place, rugs had been hung to cover the bareness of the walls. My cousin’s framed face stared back at me as if I no longer existed.