Of course, he didn’t really build it; he was just one of the experts who performed the engineering calculations, a newly-minted PhD with a suitably themed dissertation, a humble nut in a great machine really—if he stepped away, no one would have noticed. Several days later the man who actually built the place—the lead architect who had to have been there in that laughing swarm of Very Important Men receiving their congratulations and basking in his glory—left the office of the Central Committee’s Secretary, went to the bathroom, locked the stall, and hung himself on his own belt. His palace turned out to be too good for Kyiv. It overshadowed the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, and that was not just indecency and arrogance, but a grave political misstep for which the Kyiv authorities were getting their asses thoroughly kicked, and those asses had to be saved by making steps, taking measures, and finding someone to blame, preferably, by opening a criminal inquiry into the theft of construction materials, but when their best candidate for the role of the thieving conspirator so blatantly refused to play along—going so far as to hang himself in the Committee’s very own building—the inquiry, thank God and His new charge, was first postponed, and then disappeared altogether, as if flushed down the toilet, without a trace, so that soon everyone forgot about it, perfectly naturally, considering how often these things happened, impossible to keep track of them all.
Instead, Palace Ukraina was promptly closed “for renovation” and its interior efficiently stripped of the tasteful finishes, and everything—the carefully varnished beech parquet floors; the dove-gray, worsted-wool upholstery; the stained-glass lamps—was replaced with whatever was cruder, cheaper, and plebeian, so that when it opened again, a couple of months later, with the acid-blue armchairs that are still there today, I did not recognize the magical palace of my fairytales: it was gone, disappeared into thin air just as a fairytale palace would if a genie picked it up and carried it to the other side of the world in one night. Only then we at least would have had the emptiness that alone can be a fitting monument for the structure that had perished (as Ground Zero remained for years, an abysmal wound among Lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers, but we have seen our share of wounds like that long before—how many of them gape, like knocked-out teeth, in Kyiv’s streets, marking the sites of blown-up churches, of which only those whose place hasn’t been taken by a grain elevator or a Young Pioneers’ Palace are still remembered). But this palace stood right where it had been, obligingly and garishly retrofitted to resemble a humble provincial movie theater, all in one piece, and with the same name, so that one could begin to believe that the other, the original, was a figment of the collective imagination, something we all happily hallucinated together, after too much champagne, but we’re sober now, tovarishchi, and that’s what reality looks like: just an unfortunate mishap, an old story, really, and not even enough to call it a story—a bit of oversight, the guilty have been reprimanded, back to work.
Mom recalled that at first there were quite a few of them—Father’s colleagues from the institute, the Academy of Sciences, and the National Construction Research institute—who were charged with calculating a corrected budget that would demonstrate that the supplies had been overpriced and who had refused to do so, standing by the original calculations. After about a year, during which the whole mess was mostly forgotten, the dust settled, and the Party had a grand time assembling for its annual Congress at the Palace Ukraina, thus providing a conclusive blessing for its humbled innards, and someone especially stubborn had been officially reprimanded, someone else was threatened to be “reduced in force,” and some—these must’ve been the least protected, the poor doctoral students—had to leave Kyiv and go build cinemas (if not cow barns!) in small towns, my father alone remained to brandish, in the shadow of the ax that already hung above his neck, the truth that no one cared to hear. Perhaps, from the vantage point of an imposing paneled office it did look like madness: What the fuck is wrong with that freak? Who does he think he is?
Being, like my mom, a hard-skulled humanitarian, all I managed to comprehend from a cursory inspection of the folders in the attic—touched fearfully, suspiciously, like a clump of dried snake skins—was that after a while the case wasn’t about the construction costs anymore: the plot had twisted and coiled on itself, involving more and more agencies, sprouting new limbs, each one more phantasmagoric than the one before, and only Father continued to attach his original reports in defense of the crippled project to every new petition, to show where it all began—with a precision that his addressees must have found very irksome—so his petitions grew thicker as they rolled back and forth in layers of cross-references and official evasive responses and additional evidence and more evasions from higher-level offices and then his complaints about being threatened in a lower-level office and about the anonymous phone calls relating the same threats he’d received at home and about a bizarre fight at the entrance to our apartment building when several strangers beat him up (this, I remember, happened not too long before the loony bin—it must’ve been the last warning). The case dragged on for years, gathering speed and mass like a paper avalanche, like the nursery rhyme in which every chorus adds a line, growing into a menacing, galactic force—the rat ate the malt, the cat killed the rat, the dog chased the cat, the cow tossed the dog—and the creatures grow new crumpled horns at every turn, and new ones pop up, cartoon-like, bigger and bigger—the cow, the milkmaid, the man, the priest, all the way to a dinosaur, a T. rex—a whole crew of them that one day comes rolling in an ambulance, wearing white coats, what the fuck, what did you want to prove?
And that’s basically what happened—and where is the story in that?
This progressive, thickening nightmare could have been stopped at any time. All one had to do was step out, leave the game; other people did. They stayed alive and did just fine—and to them we must wish many happy returns. These were not just the small fish like Father, convicted on white-collar mismanagement charges—their name is legion—but even the quite conspicuous ones, implicated in the most resonant political scandals, ones whose names thundered across the frequencies of Western radio stations, who performed public acts of civil disobedience—shouted from a public stage, say, before the police could pin them to the floor, or threw themselves against the locked doors of an ostensibly public court hearing, or went to the Shevchenko monument on the poet’s anniversary, a single moment that could earn enough dissident credibility to last one’s life. And then, after 1991, they could write memoirs and book speaking engagements, which is precisely what most of them did, never once mentioning how it was that they got out.
One suspects they didn’t get out completely clean, one surmises they did get soiled, just a little: wrote a confessional letter, say, or perchance performed even more intimate rites of contrition and absolution (complete with promises to behave nicely henceforth) behind closed doors. Who today cares to find out? Who cares? They got out and worked, according to their professions; they received promotions, raised children, and improved their living conditions—so somewhere in those fetid infernal corridors there must have been the door, however narrow, with the green EXIT sign above it, a real, tangible way out, indicated on the emergency evacuation plans. After all we’re not talking about Stalinism here, ladies and gentlemen; this is the era of Socialism with a human face, which, translated, means if you really wanted to live, there was a choice.