2009
I hadn’t visited Snizhne since my father’s death, and I didn’t want to drive there now. However, I had to find one of the Sokolovs. None of them had answered my calls. I wasn’t surprised—they had to hate me, and wouldn’t swallow my claims that I hadn’t known who the Man from Donetsk was—so I didn’t believe that making contact over the phone would restore our relationship to what it had been. What I was hoping for was to negotiate a sum that would keep their mouths shut and get Daria back to work. I could find the money later. Not for a moment did I doubt that it would work. In this country, it always worked. You just had to know how to negotiate. If Daria wouldn’t agree, I would focus on persuading her mother and brothers.
I saw the familiar towers and mountains, then drove around aimlessly for a while, passing my old school, school number one, and turning the air-conditioning on high, as if it could make the feeling of the compass pricks disappear from the tips of my fingers. I had stabbed my fingers with that compass day after day, closing my eyes and imagining that the snow-covered mounds of coal were really mountains somewhere far away and that I was also somewhere else. I sped past overgrown statues, crumbling monuments, and deteriorating silica brick walls until I realized that I was driving along Lenina and Gagarin for perhaps the third or fourth time. I didn’t remember the city being this small.
I parked in front of Daria’s childhood home. I’d expected to find a clutch of old women gathered around the front door, whom I could ask which apartment the Sokolovs lived in. However, the weather was too cold for sitting outside, and the yard was empty. Circling the building, I peered up at the windows, but all I could see were sheer curtains and the toothlike shadows of snake plants and aloe. I had to struggle to remember. Daria’s little brother had gone to the grocery store for his mother and the other older residents of the building when the elevator broke down. The fifth floor. That’s what it was. On the wall of the elevator hung an icon of the Holy Mother of God, and I asked her guidance as I pressed the button. It didn’t help, though. All of the neighbors disregarded my stubborn buzzer ringing. I went up to the top landing. I could smell cabbage soup, and someone was listening to the news. I bet that the central radio was still working here. At my aunt’s house, the only memory of that claptrap-spewing cowbell was the radio jack in the wall. I squeezed the railing. Someone in this rathole had to know something. I knocked on the door of every apartment in the stairwell, rang every doorbell, and finally, in frustration over all the wasted work, I climbed onto the roof of the building to let the wind dry the sweat I had worked up on the stairs. The stench of cabbage and cooking oil made my stomach snarl. I hadn’t eaten, let alone slept, since yesterday, so I sat down on the cement surface. Dish antennas dotted the landscape in other places, too, but here they reminded me of toadstools. This toxic city had poisoned my life and was continuing to pollute it, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. But I had no reason to throw myself off the roof. Making a whole family disappear was expensive. Before long they would have to come up for air, and I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t be able to find them.
Returning to my car, I turned the radio on to stay awake until I could get to a gas station for some coffee, but the familiar song that came on surprised me, since it was so wrong for the moment. As I tried to change the channel, a passing truck honked. Pulling over to the side of the road, I checked what condition my eyeliner was in. Not good. I rested my head on the wheel and let Plach Yeremiyi continue on the airwaves. After escaping to Paris, I’d shared a bunk bed with a girl from Lviv who listened to the band constantly. I could hear their music at night from her headphones. She was especially fond of a song about white asters and returning to Russified cities after the summer, and I thought to myself, at least I’d gotten away from those places and would never go back. Still, something in the song made me secretly break the girl’s tape player and the cassette. She didn’t have money for a new one, so that was the end of the aster song.
She never guessed who was to blame for the vandalism. She cried when she saw the magnetic tape glittering in a tangle on the floor, and I felt bad for maybe a second but no more. I comforted her, and somehow we ended up comforting each other. She didn’t have a clue what I was capable of. Despite the fact that we slept so close to each other, I was as alien to her as Daria was to me. I’d investigated Daria so thoroughly that I’d thought I knew who she was. But now I couldn’t imagine what she might do or where she might go.
Was I any better? If someone had asked me before, what would I be prepared to do to hear more about my father’s fate, I would have responded with a laugh: the past was the past. I didn’t even visit my father’s grave. Still, I’d acted completely differently two weeks earlier when Ivan had suggested a trade for news related to my dad.
That deal had brought the intruders to Daria’s home. That deal had driven the Sokolovs underground.
That deal was something you wouldn’t be able to forgive.