This is why there could not be any doubt that my father tightened the noose around his neck with his own hands, and that’s what it must have looked like to the people who ultimately determined his fate, and that’s what it looked like to my mother, and that’s what I learned to think as well, when I got older—that he didn’t leave the already-revved juggernaut any room for maneuver, that he made a strategic mistake, erred, miscalculated. This is sad and painful, but there’s nothing we can do, and we must live on. Really, not that different than if he’d literally been run over by a truck.
And another thing: as I grew older, I began to feel ashamed of him. Compared to my classmates in school and even more so those at the university, my father was a loser, not someone I could brag about. When asked directly, as when one had to stand up in front of the entire class and report one’s parents’ occupations to the teacher, for the roster (and she doesn’t hear it the first time, so one has to repeat it, louder), I would squirm and mutter, eyes down, “Group-one disability,” and sit down, hearing, I thought, the class whisper and giggle behind my back. Such things are hard to digest—children can never forgive their parents for humiliating them.
His death at home—they let him go home when his kidneys failed after another long course of “treatment”—could do no more than add guilt to the shame: mix a spoon of soda with a spoon of salt, and time kept blending the two together into a thinning bitterly salty mix that nothing could sweeten, neither the increasingly frequent enthusiastic letters (especially post-1991, and even more so once my face became a regular fixture on TV) from his former colleagues and students about what a great teacher he was and how much they all, it turns out, loved him (Where were they then?), nor our producer’s very tangible offer to raise the story with Palace Ukraina from its thirty-year-old tomb in the archives and fashion my father a glamorous, albeit posthumous, almost-dissident biography. Here was a real opportunity, a chance to restore to people’s minds the forgotten pages of recent history (as if the people in question had any unforgotten pages of history, recent or distant). The idea was not bad, but it was nipped in the bud by one well-known poet—one of those once widely read, with patriotic verses and a vague victim-of-the-regime claim. Interestingly enough, I wanted to interview her on the occasion of her birthday—and found myself in a knockdown: the draft-horse-sized harpy with a bad bite spent the first half hour spraying me with spit, tossing her head to make the few remaining strands of her dyed hair bounce (which about forty years ago may have signaled to some undemanding men both a temperament of a young ogress and the spirit of an indomitable patriot), and making absolutely sure that I realized how privileged I was to have been granted access to a person who only “interacts with very select people”; she then proceeded to relate, in great detail and with vivid illustrations, as if it had happened the day before, how for her first, fifty-year jubilee—the same year, I quickly calculated, when they gave Stus, also a poet, his second (and deadly) prison sentence—the National Writers’ Union didn’t even send her a congratulatory telegram, but instead mailed her (imagine that!) an invitation to someone else’s reading—the harpy still, twenty-five years later, remembered whose—scheduled, intentionally, no doubt, on the same day, and that’s what it was like, being persecuted! I did not manage to get out of her any other details of the persecution. The harpy didn’t have a story either, only a personal myth, one that must have been promoted by quite a few men dazzled by the then naturally auburn tress-tossing, so that now the glow of their past efforts could warm her vacuous old age, in which she didn’t give a flying fuck about all those friends of her mythical youth who had perished in camps in the middle of nowhere, whose memory, had it survived, perchance would have permitted her to retain some sense of proportion and style.
I left that apartment and fell to pieces. The vision of dragging my father’s made-up cadaver into the same carnival tent of “the persecuted,” where this veteran martyr held court, soured everything with particular potency, and I proceeded to get most ingloriously drunk at Baraban that night, downing the strongest cocktails like a sorority girl—but they all tasted of soda and salt, and in the morning the hangover reeked of the same, salt and soda. There was no story. I had to make peace with the plain, dumb reality: I was the only evidence that the man had ever existed on this planet. I had his eyes and his blood type. Come to think of it, why would anyone expect anything different? Isn’t this the fate of the human race?
this!!!—a scribble in the margins, a bauble that slipped out of the suitcase—turned the binoculars for me. For an instant, as if a flash of lightning cut through the darkness, I saw a living soul, and the strange thing was that it was the same father about whom I, against my best instincts, continued to feel ashamed. His only place in any historical narrative was that of a nameless extra, a statistical value—one of the myriad, if they could ever be counted, whose names were not listed by Amnesty International, who had not been arrested or sent to prisons, but who succumbed, slowly and quietly, in their own beds, to legitimate cardiac arrests and kidney failures, and other disorders, whose causes were clear only to their families if they had any. We could also add those who drank themselves to death and those who killed themselves—the only meaningful history we can craft for the future is the history of numbers, and the more zeros—the better. Six (Or more?) million dead Jews equal the Holocaust. Ten (Or fewer?) million dead Ukrainian peasants equal Holodomor. Three-hundred-million refugees equal the fifty-six local wars at the beginning of the twenty-first century. History is written by accountants.
During the Khrushchev thaw, officials who issued belated death certificates to the families of those executed in the NKVD prisons came up with all kinds of diseases to fill in the “cause of death” field—thus erasing zeros from the number of executions. Another twenty years later their fictional cardiac arrests and kidney failures became real, as is commonly the case with useful inventions, and literally killed people whose fathers and grandfathers they could beset only on paper, post-factum. Another number was made unreal, and with it, an entire generation lost its common story, leaving its descendants no means of detecting a shared fate—from here, they all look discrete, just people who lived, died, things happened, you know… this one was a decent engineer and a talented lecturer who died from the side effect of a drug, having done his time in a psychiatric clinic with a falsified diagnosis—and that’s it, go ahead, tie those little strings into a dead knot. I needed the inadvertent insight to make the puzzle pieces fall into place—the triumphant snap of fingers, the blue bunny in a school sketchbook, the catchy, generous laugh, the charge of energy that filled the man—to see him from inside and recognize, in that flash, what it was that drove him, had driven him to the end, that had not permitted him to back off and make the single required concession that white was really black: his indomitable abhorrence of his own fear, the physiological mandate from his very healthy and apparently very proud soul (and the soul has its own physiology that does not always agree with that of the body) to reject this fear that had been implanted in him against his will, like viral DNA. If you spend years carrying around something you cannot live with, it might just become easier to crash upon the water than to stop diving.
In the time I spent with the crumbly book, I experienced a rush of fierce, bone-piercing bliss, as if soaring on a glider: I could be proud of him. Not as my father—he had been gone too long for that—but as a person I could admire had I met him now. It seemed forever since I’d actually met anyone like that (Did they really all die out?), and the unfulfilled need to be around them—not even to be close; I’d be happy to admire my heroes quietly, from the crowd, if only there’d been someone to admire—pulled on my insides, like hunger, like vitamin deficiency or sexual dissatisfaction, and the discovery splashed my face like life-giving water: How could this be, I muttered half-consciously? How could this happen? I put down the book and stumbled around the room, blindly, as if feeling for something I had lost there, then fell back onto the chair and stared, just as blindly, at the same page, while my thoughts looped on themselves, tangled into knots, refusing to register the real shock: How could it be that I really know nothing about him? And won’t ever know—won’t ever find any other evidence of his life as he lived it? He didn’t write private letters, didn’t keep a journal, didn’t leave a single impression of his internal self in any material substance I could find, pick up, turn over—nothing, except a random remark in the margin of a random book.