The child wasn’t just my life insurance policy. Still, when I was forced to admit that Daria wasn’t coming back, I threw away my pills on purpose at the end of the day. I didn’t even dare to start my own car after taking one of the girls to the train in the early evening. Trying to calm down, I watched all the other people who climbed behind the wheels of their cars without hesitation and drove away, sliding like silver-bellied fish into their schools. Daria wouldn’t know how to install a car bomb, but I wasn’t sure about her brothers. I couldn’t negotiate with them, because I couldn’t contact them. The whole family had disappeared a week ago. If they didn’t want money, I didn’t know what they wanted. Probably my life.
Standing up, I started walking to the parking lot and lit a cigarette as I tried to think about something else. Students dragged checkered bags from the railway station, presumably full of food sent from home. They staggered under the weight of their burdens, and watching them reminded me that Daria hadn’t shown up at the university. Turning away, I realized that I was accidentally smoking a heartache cigarette. This was a nickname we’d invented at the agency. Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes were so beautiful that they even healed wounds of the heart, so women always chose them in moments of despair. I threw the gold-filtered cigarette on the ground and quickly got back in my car. I’d been telling myself that this silly goose would come to her senses if only for the bonus we were supposed to pay her for the Kravets baby being born healthy. I managed to block the money transfer at the last minute. I’d never met anyone who would turn down cash.
I tried to make myself start the engine. I couldn’t do it, though, and my eyes drifted to the rear bumpers of the cars in front of me. Each of them was decorated with a sticker indicating that the car had been blessed. My car didn’t have one.
Placing my keys in my bag, I headed for the tram stop. I felt as if I was moving in slow motion compared to the surrounding world, and the tram filled before I could reach it. I decided to wait for the next one, and as it stopped, I focused my gaze on the ticket inspector’s seat visible through the window, which was indicated by a teddy bear tied to the seatback. That would be my focal point to hold the world in place. I didn’t understand how climbing two steps into a perfectly ordinary vehicle had become so difficult. The thought of strangers’ bodies against mine felt impossible. Should I call Aleksey for help and lie that my car had broken down? Was the man who had crowded in next to me watching me? I didn’t dare take out my phone.
I jumped down onto the tracks and hurried to the Petrovsky statue, where I stopped. I glanced back. The yellow and red sides of the trams crackled in my eyes like a broken television, but the man was gone. I tried to collect my thoughts, to think of what to do and how you did it, how you dared to start your car even though you set bombs in other people’s. At least you had. What was that like? To get behind the wheel right after someone else had been blown to pieces? Was it like a high followed by a hangover or like a birth whose pains you soon forgot? Or was it like the adrenaline rush of a fight? Did it bring you joy that you were alive and someone else was not? Did it make you feel second only to God? Could you get hooked on the feeling, like I was addicted to the respect and admiration that followed me in my work as a giver of life?
A couple of men with cleaning tools were bustling around the base of Petrovsky’s statue. Someone had spray-painted the monument again, writing “The Butcher” on it in bloodred letters. The Petrovsky statue in Kyiv had been knocked down. Here it still stood. I remembered Babusya Vilina’s mother. They said she had eaten her own child’s corpse during the Holodomor, which the Butcher had actively promoted. Babusya’s mother had gone mad. Her surviving descendants had continued their lives, though. One of her great grandchildren even drove by the Butcher’s bronze statue calmly every day but took fright from insignificant setbacks like some crybaby. I turned back to climb onto the next tram. My behavior was stupid. Babusya had survived much worse. She’d seen that spring in the camps meant bodies being exposed by the melting snow. And my grandfather? He had plunged into the depths of the collapsed mine shafts of Donbas to repair the destruction of the war with only an oil lamp and an ax. I was so weak that I couldn’t even approach a random tram stop that would be buzzing with people again after a moment’s pause. If the Sokolovs wanted to take revenge on me, this would be the ideal place. Daria could get close to me unnoticed. Or her brother. Or her uncle, since she had those, too. I turned my head this way and that to find somewhere else to go. The metro station. I blinked. The crumbling of the Eastern Bloc had slowed the underground construction plans that had been so grandiose in the beginning, and there were only a few stations. That was why hardly anyone used it, and so it felt safe.
On the deserted platform, I would see any signs of danger more easily, and at that moment it felt important to get farther away from the train station, anywhere farther away. I needed protection from the hostile stares of the strangers I faced wherever I turned my gaze.
By the time I reached the metro station, I was trembling so violently that my token fell out of my hand and started rapidly rolling away. Squinting in the dim light, I chased it on the muddy floor until I caught it in front of the booth of the guard who was watching me. I felt the woman’s suspicious gaze follow me to the escalator, which was dizzyingly long. Anyone could run past me and shove me headlong. Anyone could push me onto the tracks, even the guard herself. The station platform was like a tomb whose yellow light made my skin appear embalmed. Its marble echoed death, and its emptiness was a threat. I pulled out my phone and decided to call Aleksey for help. My fingers were shaking so badly that I accidentally took a photo. The flash fired. An elderly person nearby began to gripe that pictures weren’t allowed here and waved his cane. I stood frozen in place and listened like a child receiving a lecture for a mistake she had committed. The Soviet-era ban on photography of strategic locations was still in force. I could smell his unwashed skin and the stench of onion, cabbage, and dried fish that clung to his clothing. Spit spattered on me from his mouth. I didn’t respond to his curses. I didn’t leave either, and I didn’t even move away. I just stared at the wall across the tracks. There were no advertisements on it, so it reminded me of Moscow, where I had ridden on a subway for the first time. The light and colors were the same, and I could almost hear my father saying to hold on tight to his hand. I’d been afraid of the jostling people and the endless-seeming escalators and their wooden steps. Metal would make sparks, Dad had taught me, so wood was a safer option. This made me more nervous, because then I started thinking of fire, not the walls of the metro station. I couldn’t imagine advertisements on them. I hadn’t seen anything like that in trams or at stops, not before Paris, so I couldn’t understand what an ad covering an entire station network would mean for my face. I’d just jumped for joy when my agent told me the news: I’d been invited to a test shoot for a chestnut puree. It was a big outdoor advertising campaign, and for once I saw the chance for a job that would pay actual money. My agent had seen further, though. She thought I should have refused. But I went anyway, and I was selected.
I never told you the real reason I left modeling. I said I was tired of the superficiality of the industry and longed for home. In actuality, I didn’t dare to admit how my career had been tripped up by my own stupidity. I didn’t understand the value hierarchies of my new environment. All of the Western girls had known what Chanel was and what Louis Vuitton was, since they had grown up in a world where brand consciousness came in at mothers’ milk. I hadn’t comprehended what an earth-shattering difference there was between a Dior ad and a chestnut puree company ad, simply waving it off when my agent warned me that gigs like this were best avoided if I wanted to attract the interest of major designers and get ahead in my career. If I became someone’s muse, my slightly too short body wouldn’t matter. Catwalks were for muses, not catalog girls, let alone chestnut puree mademoiselles. At the beginning of my career, I’d done reasonably well in the Asian market, where now I was already too old and too fat. Unless I changed my trajectory, my final years would be near at hand elsewhere, too.
However, hunger had stopped up my ears. Our compensation came too often in clothes from shoots, and I needed real money. That was what the chestnut puree advertisement was offering. But when the metro platforms were plastered with my face and people began to recognize me on the street, my purse was no fatter than before. Instead, my calendar emptied. I couldn’t get any more shoots, not even for catalogs. I scraped along for a while, thinking that everyone would forget the ad. But that didn’t happen. I was always just that chestnut girl, which turned me into a worthless investment, so my agent dropped me. A couple of hundred euros was all I received from the job, even though the same brand is still printing my image in the advertising that used up my face and sent me down the road that led to this Dnipro metro platform. I deserved this old man’s rebukes, his saliva, and his cane waving. It was perfectly justified.
Eventually I managed to drive my car home to the safety of the parking garage, and as soon as I arrived, I called you. I assumed that something in your voice would betray you if my panic attack, heartbreak cigarettes, and feeling of being watched were signs that my shaky house of cards had collapsed. I didn’t know what I would do if you didn’t answer other than not get out of the car and not go inside. The phone rang for a long time, and every beep sounded like the bells of doom. Sitting still, I prayed to the Holy Mother of God until you came on the line. I strained my ears, but I couldn’t hear anything except affection in your voice, and that gave me the courage to leave the car and walk to the elevators. Under your words I could make out the London traffic and hurried steps, and I drew out the call so I could reach the right floor, search my apartment, including the closets and under the bed, and pour myself fifty grams of cognac. After tossing that back, I was ready to hang up. I didn’t dare drink any more for fear of dulling my alertness. For a moment I leaned against my front door. I remembered the time when people started replacing their wooden doors with more secure ones. Nothing in my apartment in this new high-rise needed remodeling. The previous resident had still upgraded the door, though, which was steel, and for a moment I wondered what had happened to that person. Shaking the vague thought from my head, I was pleased that at least one thing was right, if only one, and soon I’d be able to try to gain more security by the oldest method in the world. The decision to throw my pills in the trash was easy. You would have to protect the mother of your child if someone from that disturbed clan wanted to do me in, and I didn’t just mean the Kravetses, I also meant Daria’s family. I’d kept her disappearance quiet for too long to report it now. I’d also lied at the office in a moment of panic, saying that Daria wanted to focus on her studies for a while, but that explanation wouldn’t hold water for long. If Viktor and his wife wanted more children, they wouldn’t want any other donor, not after she had turned out to be a true angel for them.
I didn’t dare to use my own car, which didn’t have bulletproof glass, unlike Aleksey’s SUV, so I traveled as much as possible with him, avoiding being out alone. I didn’t go into the parking garage at my building anymore, I didn’t go shopping, and I didn’t visit public places—not cafés, not restaurants, not nightclubs—and I began to long for your return while you were still only on your way to the Dnipro airport. You didn’t notice my strange routines, because I thought nothing could happen when I was with you. But you did notice when a motorcycle that passed close to us startled me, and when a car tire burst on the street, and that I pushed my food around on my plate at restaurants like an anorexic who wanted to make it look like she was eating. Your favorite spot on the terrace at Mimino made me break out in a cold sweat, and eating was difficult because the food caught in my throat. I even carried my own water bottles, like Garry Kasparov. I kept an icon Babusya had given me in my purse, and I looked up the symptoms of poisoning online. In the middle of our weekly meeting, I wondered why the KGB had killed Stepan Bandera by shooting him with a cyanide capsule instead of a regular bullet. And why had the reporter Georgiy Gongadze been pumped full of dioxin before he was decapitated? What sense was there in that? And how big a rug did you need to wrap a person in? How many meters of plastic?
I began to avoid standing in front of windows, and I slept behind the couch with my clothes on. If we were in the city at the same time, I came to your place for the night. It was like drinking bootleg liquor every day: at any moment I could lose my sight or my life.
A while later we were in Zaporizhia, and I was going to see a potential girl in the Leninsky neighborhood before the evening’s New Year’s gala. The Buryat girl was a local, so she was only valuable to us in our search for other Asian-looking donors, which were in short supply in America. They paid well for them there. You offered to give me a ride, and I explained the situation to you on the way.
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” you asked. “I know a couple of up-and-coming lawyers in Moscow whose job search has been difficult because of the shape of their eyes. They’re saving money for surgery.”
“Is the situation really that bad?”
“On Victory Day and other national holidays, they stay home, or they get beat up.”
“Maybe they should go to America.”
I took out a water bottle and washed the tightness out of my throat. I didn’t know whether I felt worse for these Buryat girls or myself. Beat up. I couldn’t get the words out of my head. When I met with the girl and explained her assignment, those words were throbbing inside of me. When I returned to your car, where you’d been waiting for me, the words still wouldn’t leave me alone, instead pounding on the back of my skull like a train running me down.
I’d booked a facial for that evening at a beauty salon, where I’d intended to go on our return trip. The closer we got to the salon, though, the less I wanted to go. Accidents were constantly happening in the saunas in this country, and the prosecutors always called them suicides. I found no comfort in the low probability that Daria could afford to bribe the judiciary, because how did I know what kind of connections her father had?
“I think I’ll cancel my appointment. I’d rather be with you,” I said and placed my hand on your thigh and tried to smile, all the while thinking about whether the Sokolovs could scrape together twenty thousand euros. Ordering a murder was cheaper than having a baby via a surrogate, and lying in a strange place alone with a mask on my face would make me an easy target. For a slightly higher amount, they could have me shot in front of witnesses in broad daylight with no fear of prison time. A beating wouldn’t be enough for the Sokolovs; of that I was sure.
“What’s the matter?” you asked and switched off the engine.
We were there. I didn’t budge. I couldn’t get out of the car. I couldn’t walk the few meters to the salon. I couldn’t open the door. I pinched myself. I was becoming paranoid. But Daria hadn’t returned to the university. She had abandoned her former life.
“I thought you would be relieved. Lada Pavlovna has a healthy child, and everyone is crazy about you,” you said.
“I am relieved.”
“No, you aren’t. You don’t sleep, you’re skittish, and you change appointments at the last minute. Or is it because of me? Do you have someone—”
“No, never,” I said in shock.
“So, what, then?”
“It can take time for tension to wear off. Maybe it’s hard for me to believe that everything is finally okay. I might need a vacation.”
“A vacation?”
You turned to look at me. The idea brightened me up. Everything might look better if I could get away for a while. I still didn’t want to go to the salon, though, so I needed to deflect your attention from my strange behavior.
“Yes, a vacation. And today we could take a tour of Zap.”
“Do you really want to go sightseeing, here? Wasn’t the tallest Lenin statue in the country enough?”
“I meant places that are important to you.”
Your fingers drummed the wheel. You never spoke about your past with much enthusiasm, but there was nothing strange about a woman wanting to know something about her lover’s early years. For a moment I was proud of my tactical move.
“All right. Do you see that kiosk?”
Pointing to the small newsstand on the other side of the street, you talked about getting into the first real fight of your life in front of it. In those days there were older boys lurking nearby who would either steal the chewing gum you’d just bought or take littler kids’ money. Then came the time when you decided you’d had enough, and after the fight you became the one who took what you wanted from others, not the one who was taken from.
“Is someone stealing from you?” you asked at the end of your story. “Is that why you’ve been so nervous? Or did you kill someone by accident? One of the girls?”
“No, for God’s sake.”
My explanations hadn’t worked, and now who knew what you were imagining?
“If you did, it isn’t a problem, but you have to tell me what’s going on. No matter what it is, I’ll help.”
That would have been the right time to reveal everything. But I chickened out.
“It’s nothing like that. Really. A vacation will help. Or maybe I need to find another job, switch industries.”
“You have subordinates. Let them handle the dirty work.”
A couple of days earlier, my boss had told me about the future of the company. We were set to expand, and I would become responsible for all operations in Ukraine while she spent time in other countries setting up offices to serve local clients. Even though my boss didn’t object to my desire to stay in Dnipro for you—I could handle my additional responsibilities from there—I no longer wanted what I’d been aiming for. I didn’t want to be the one who does the dirty work or the one who puts it on others.
“Still. Maybe it would be nice to live somewhere else. What do you think? At least for a little while.”
“Why not? Although Veles might have other ideas.”
If I’d admitted everything then, you might have understood my mistake. Maybe you would have remembered how Veles helped you avenge your family’s murder and would have seen the connection between the two situations. You understood payback, and so you could have helped me solve my problem, find Daria, and force her back to work. But I didn’t seize the moment, because as a side effect of my actions, I had betrayed you, and by remaining silent, I was following my family’s tradition and my mother’s lessons.
You met her once. Early in the summer, I’d built up the courage to take you to Mykolaiv to meet my family, without a clue that in the autumn of that same year I would ruin everything by agreeing to Ivan’s proposal. During our excursion, everything was still good. Snow blossomed on the acacia, poplar, and snowball trees like a cotton wool dream, and after we arrived, I saw immediately that you would get along with everyone. I’d been worried for nothing. You may remember that at the end of dinner, my aunt turned on the antenna radio, and the news just happened to be doing a story about some people on trial for causing a famine, which prompted you to mention that most of your extended family had been executed after the Buryat revolt and then the rest were shipped off to the camps. Even though those incidents weren’t directly related to the Holodomor, hunger had been familiar in all the camps. Mom nodded and said she was born in Irkutsk, where her parents had been deported, her father from Estonia and her mother from Ukraine. There had been a lot of Buryats in Irkutsk. Friendly people, she said. I didn’t express my amazement out loud, but I was shocked at her confession. Never before had I witnessed my mother reveal her origins to any stranger. Even when she’d met my father, my mother told him she was from Tallinn—as she’d become accustomed to telling everyone on Babusya Vilina’s advice, for good reason.
My family’s tradition of embellishing birthplaces began after Stalin’s death, when my mother’s father was given permission to return from deportation to his birthplace. The reception at home in Estonia was frosty. People looked askance at the young bride he’d brought back from Irkutsk—Vilina—and no one wanted to hold a daughter who had been born in such a place. My grandfather’s family saw his Ukrainian wife as nothing more than a Russian-speaking woman who had taken advantage of a poor man to get ahead and gain access to the Estonian smorgasbord. In their minds, Vilina had Russified our family, and that wasn’t just about the tin teeth in my grandparents’ mouths.
These tensions bothered my grandfather, but he reasoned that it was all because he had been deported, and his relatives feared the label would attach to them. Irkutsk had that kind of effect. However, things eventually became so bitter that my grandfather broke with his Estonian family.
As time passed, my mother came to understand that my father—the man she was going dancing with—didn’t covet a career in the Communist Party or want to gain entry to anyplace that required an impeccable background, as she had feared. He was not inspired by the medals her father had earned in the fight against fascism. Even so, she didn’t dare reveal where she was born. At first, she decided to wait until he proposed. Then she decided to wait until they had their marriage license and she could go shop at the specialty store only for those who had one. As she looked at herself in the mirror in her white dress, she thought it would be a shame if she couldn’t use it. As the wedding day approached, the right moment never came—a restaurant had even been reserved for the reception, as well as a time at the Palace of Happiness to register the union. What if the groom got angry and canceled the wedding? How would she explain that to everyone? The invitations had already been sent.
Ultimately it was the Estonian apple trees that forced my mother to tell her family’s story. My dad began to wonder why we never went to help with the harvest in the fall. My mother’s paternal relatives—the ones who looked down their noses at my grandparents—lived on a collective farm, but they had a kitchen garden and more, and that fall the harvest was good. My mother always avoided the topic with a new excuse. Finally, Dad lost his temper, and then Mom told him.
He wasn’t even angry. He thought Estonian apples were worse than Ukrainian ones anyway.
Mom avoided telling my father about her background for the same reason I didn’t tell you about Snizhne. She worried that doing so would label her as a liar in his eyes. If she had deceived him in one thing, why wouldn’t she in others? I thought the same way when I met you, and the more time went by, the more difficult it became. So the right moment never came.
When my mother talked about these events with Babusya Vilina, neither of them ever said she should have acted differently. Instead, once I heard my mom say she couldn’t be sure my dad wouldn’t have left her if she’d revealed the truth before I was born. Trust is so hard to rebuild after a betrayal. That’s why I can’t think of a single reason you should believe me if I ever have the time to tell you who killed Viktor.