“All kinds of stuff. You can’t quantize so much bull to the proper bit rate.”
“Sweetie, could you please use words I can understand?”
“Sorry. He wore me out, that guy. The whole time, ever since I first met him, I have had this nagging feeling that I’ve seen him somewhere before—I told you—or if not him, then maybe someone who looks like him, and I can never see him clearly with this weird feeling in the back of my mind, the picture’s always doubling up on me.”
“Same here. Could it be because he’s lived someone else’s life?”
“There’s that, too…. Who from his generation has lived his or her own life?”
“My dad. Your mom.”
“They haven’t. They died. That’s the thing.”
“Still, Aidy. You shouldn’t compare his lot with anyone else’s, God help him…”
“Well, whatever, that’s not my point, actually. The whole time he was talking I tried to figure out where he was going with it—and he’s got more logic gaps in his tale than you can count; it messes up your algorithm. Take his mother, again. If she was in the Przemysl ghetto, then back in ’42, it couldn’t have been the Red Army that freed her, I’m sorry. She had to have escaped somehow—so how did she run into the NKVD? And what on earth possessed them to send her, a Jewish woman, under cover into Bandera’s underground? Nonsense, it doesn’t add up. And he just kept hammering on his ‘she was a Soviet citizen!’ As if every Soviet citizen automatically had to be an agent. Like fucking serfs.”
“C’mon, that was just the natural logic of that government. That’s what a citizen was for them—a serf, a subject. Like in the feudal days. You don’t remember it—you were little then…”
“Yeah, and the new government just thinks we’re morons. Go vote for whoever we tell you to, and don’t make a fuss. If you’re not nickeled, you’re dimed.”
“Yep. Sounds about right.”
“Are you feeling sorry for him, or something?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I thought you might be. He doesn’t seem to bother you…”
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Finally there’s an answer that explains it all. Thank you.”
“What are upset about, love? You’re not jealous, are you?”
“Me? Of him? You’re crazy!”
“No, wait a minute, you actually are…. Look at me, come on, you goof… now. What’s wrong? Captain, my captain—what’s bugging you?”
“I don’t know, Lolly. It’s… it’s all weird. Weird. The whole time back there, he was talking to you—just you; I might as well not have been there, a fifth wheel, you know, the lady’s escort. Someone to pour the vodka, sure, lend a hand. And the way you listened to him… wait, let me finish! I understand, he played a very meaningful role in your life. Your mother’s life. But you cannot forget that it was an exchange and not just an act of charity for which you must forever hang on to his every word. You don’t need to be a genius to see that your mom made something big click in his head, too—it’s obvious. A gear without which he may not have survived at all. He’s pretty hung up on the suicide theme, did you notice?”
“I did, sure. I actually think that’s his greatest fear as far as Nika goes. Lest she find out that her grandmother killed herself, I mean…. He let something slip about a curse, remember?”
“Of course, and Nika’s another thing…. He is making her your responsibility, no? Didn’t you see—passing her on to you, so to speak, as your inheritance! For you to take her as your friend, or who knows what… your charge. By the same old curatorial logic, from the KGB. So basically, he and you have your own story. And I’m just sitting there, pouring vodka into plastic cups. Meanwhile, it was his old man who carried out my great-aunt’s death sentence—and Boozerov has been aware of this ever since I first submitted my inquiry to the archives, last fall. But if it weren’t for his daughter, the concert—like hell he would’ve told us this. Or that Gela was pregnant.”
“You know, I can’t shake that off—this must have been done in some office of theirs, right? The examination, the analysis of the remains…. It was someone’s job to do that, can you imagine? Collect the mangled bodies, sort them: ours over here, the other side’s—over there… the mother here, the fetus—separately, over there….”
“Hang on, you’ll make me lose my point. It’s not the different pieces, as you said, that are patched together—it’s as if there were three different processes, and all of them nonlinear, oscillatory, a wave system—the Schrödinger equation. That’s why he’s out of focus, you know, that’s why he sort of… flickers—there are more dimensions than you or I can each individually perceive. Do you understand?”
“Honestly, no.”
“Okay, did you take advanced geometry in school? Do you remember how to represent a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional plain?”
“Draw three different views, from three sides?”
“Something like that. So what I’m saying, it’s the same here. The world I—we—live in has fewer dimensions than we need to get an accurate representation of the process, so all we get is a set of random views, and not even a complete set. And the views you get don’t match the ones I get—like, say, if you had the front view, and I got the plane view… and I don’t fall into your dimension, I’m not inside that field.”
“Meaning what?”
“I’m just a go-between, Lolly. Like a semiconductor, you see? And occasionally, a catalyst. And that’s how it’s been for me the whole time, from the beginning: I function as an add-on to your project. Your project that involves my family and for which you needed a guide. A go-between…”
“Weird…”
“No shit.”
“No, it’s weird because sometimes I feel precisely the opposite. That it’s my project that functions as a go-between—between you and me.”
“And I’ve had enough of this going between. I want there to be the two of us, together, and no one else. I want to be your man, period. Your husband, not a go-between. Do you see the difference, or do I have to explain that too?”
“You goof… that’s who you are.”
“I’m not sure, baby. I’m not sure.”
“I am. You cover me. You have my back, all the time; you don’t even notice it because it comes so naturally to you. This is why you got so worked up, too—because you took the whole Pavlo Ivanovych, the brunt of him, and now the aftershock of it is rattling you.”
“Hm. You think?”
“Can’t you feel it yourself?”
“I don’t know…. He really got under my skin, that’s for sure. Like I got some virus from him and it went running through my bones—smashing everything in its way… bowling. And on top of that, I had to swallow it all as I listened. Just think: I’ve been working like a fucking ox for seven years, kissing up to God-knows-who, fighting for every little old tchotchke tooth and nail, trying to save at least a bit of our past, and underwriting the SBU’s fucking budget with my hard-earned coin on top of that; and there he sits, paid, again, with my hard-earned coin—after he burned the archives! And the thing is—he’s still convinced he did the right thing, and you can’t get through to him!”
“Leave him alone, Aidy, others have gotten through already—left plenty of holes in him. He’s a colander.”
“Sure, someone tells you a sob story about his difficult childhood, and you’re ready to feel sorry for him!”