Ukrainians, as any preschooler will tell you, focus on much simpler, homely things: arms, drugs, non-ferrous metals, poached Carpathian lumber, girls “for work in Europe”—fail-safe operations, with good cash flow, and who needs academies and shit like that; let things take their course, the country’ll find its way; let all those nutty artists and other trash feel secure as they would in their mommies’ bosoms for the simple reason that no one gives a flying fuck about them; let them live and graze, if they can find themselves a pasture.
Vlada and I talked about all this a million times, laughing at especially burlesque episodes, such as the time she bought her apartment—a transaction that involved a change of clothes in the bathroom stall at the real-estate trade exchange to release a money belt packed with fifty thousand sweaty dollars from its rather erotic captivity under Vlada’s bodysuit; don’t let anyone tell you that money doesn’t smell, but who would have thought twice about the little woman as she marched down the street, wrapped in layers of baggy knee-long sweaters like an onion? Just like that, Vlada went all over the city, and outside the city, alone with rolled-up canvases in her car because no one on God’s green earth would ever want them! Folks, think about it, I wanted to tell all those scandalmongers who wouldn’t give up on their murder mystery involving a famous artist and unimaginable wealth (three paintings, in fact, which together might have fetched ten thousand dollars on a good day in our kind of market): What would your hit man do with those paintings? How would he go about turning them into cash? So, of course, I laid it all out—my iron-clad logic of A, B, C, and D, and so on—as soon as anyone mentioned the topic (And the idiots just wouldn’t let it rest, would they?); for the longest time their openly disapproving response remained a mystery to me: Why did they always behave like I was taking something away from them? Like I came to steal something precious? At the same time, parallel and yet more outrageous versions seeped out of some dark corners, like water trickling from under the door of a flooded bathroom: one was that the accident was Vlada’s way of killing herself, and what shocked me most was that this version was popular not among the casual, nothing-better-to-do observers, but among her own people—the painters she knew, all of whom suddenly felt compelled to voice their personal, unique eyewitness accounts about the last time they saw or talked to Vlada and how they “would never guess anything like that”; the other hypothesis, even crazier in its own way, was that Vlada was killed because of Vadym, as in, someone wanted to send him a message, a mysterious competitor or, God help us, a political rival—as if the dude were the redeemer of the anti-Kuchma coalition or something. But this one stopped me in my tracks for a second once I remembered his desperate muttering of “I killed her,” which, let’s face it, could have had a different meaning from what I was able to comprehend, with my bovine perceptiveness, at the moment, especially when one recalled that the number of politicians and entrepreneurs killed in car accidents on our country’s roads grew longer by the day—a fact that was even deemed noteworthy by The New York Times, which doesn’t bestow such honor on Ukrainian events very often—and every one of those deaths had been ruled, in official speak, “a misfortunate accident.” Philosophically speaking, the ruling had its own logic: there’s very little fortune in anyone’s sudden death, and as far as accidents go, every single event in our lives is an accident, all of them—or, maybe, none at all—and the very hairs on our heads are all numbered, only we’re not the ones doing the numbering, a conclusion that prompts our nation, which had given the world the great philosopher Skovoroda, to settle back, having made a bit of a fuss, every time, into its very Skovorodian stoicism; but to imagine that one of these “accidents” could have been aimed at Vadym, that he was so important that someone would’ve considered Vlada, his utterly uninvolved-in-his-business girlfriend, collateral damage—this was too much, even for Ukraine. Yet no sooner could one version be dismissed than several new ones appeared and spread in every direction, overtaking, like rising water, every dike reason could put in their path, going under and around in countless trickles, and it took me more than a few months of this to learn not to blush like a ripe tomato and screech mean things, quite without composure, every time someone asked me the question, with its probing emphasis, “Are you sure it was an accident?”—more than a few months to grasp that it was not truth people asked for, whatever it ultimately turned out to be, but a story. Amen. And who am I, who makes a living manufacturing such stories, to judge them?
Against my better nature, I had to admit, nothing is better suited for a story than the sudden tragic death of a brilliant and famous young woman. No young man’s death could ever produce the same effect—it’s as if men were expected to die, were doomed to die by some silent communal pact, if not in war, then somewhere else, as if the poor things were quite unfit for anything else, and that’s why with men, it’s not the fact of the death itself that we judge but how well it was performed: Did the deceased meet his fate chin-up, did he take it bravely on the chest, thus fulfilling a man’s purpose, or did he try to hide, like a coward, and betray said purpose dishonorably? We must reach one of these conclusions—call it The People’s Death Police, if you will—and that’s why we will not forget the case of journalist Georgiy Gongadze until we are delivered his tangible, bleeding real death instead of anonymous beheaded remains dug up somewhere in the woods. But no one remembers Vadym Boiko, the face of Ukrainian TV in the early 1990s, who shortly before a blast in his apartment was giddily showing his colleagues a thick file—I’ve got them all, those old Commies, right here, at last, you’ll see it all tomorrow!—and when the smoke cleared everyone saw Boiko’s burned body and cracked concrete ceilings. Boiko is quite forgotten because why would anyone bother remembering if everyone knows what happened?
A young woman’s death is another matter altogether: it is always seen as a violation of the very natural order of things, since the first thought is inevitably about her brood—when there isn’t any (and will never be) and when there is (who will watch, oh, who will care, who will wash my orphan’s hair as the folk song mourns, and a million like it, century after century). A story is badly needed here—it alone can help restore the natural order of things; it can focus the frame and present this one death as a horrible aberration, a painful disruption for which someone, somewhere, will have to answer, if not now, then eventually, and if not in a court of law, then to a higher Judgment. If, on top of everything else, the victim was seen as a princess, showered with gifts by fairy godmothers every birthday and Christmas (Which already hinted at a trespass, inserted the required measure of injustice into the equation: Why should she be the special one?), and if she never once in her life acted the victim because she was too proud, or had principles, or for whatever other reason, then it only makes more sense to blame her for everything—let her take it all, if she’s so special—and close the case, turn, spit, curse, nothing like this would ever happen to me. A story like that is a chant, a protective spell that seals the other person’s death, puts it in an airtight glass sarcophagus, fit for a museum display—you can look, you can walk around it, you can even run your fingers on the glass and tap it with a pointer as you teach the lesson of how one ought not to live, lest one intends to find oneself at the height of one’s powers—and six feet under: Always buckle your seat belt, follow the rules, avoid dubious liaisons, don’t paint unsettling pictures and, for God’s sake, don’t rise so far above the crowd. All my dogged As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and so on were no more than a pathetic, wasted, toothless attack at this thick glass sarcophagus—an assault on people’s fundamental, self-preserving belief that death, our own or someone else’s, must have a sensible reason, that the world is just. And what did I have to counter this—my wimpy, childish, and inconsolable “It’s not fair”?