“NO MORE idleness,” Maxim says. “Today we correct the dancer.”
“You are too eager, Maxim. Personal ambition doesn’t sit well on a socialist’s shoulders.”
He grunts. He may be science’s fullest proof that man is descended from monkey.
A few days have passed since we received the photograph of the disgraced dancer. I’ve hoped she’d be overlooked in the influx of other offending images. The anteroom is a shoulder-high maze of boxes growing taller by the day. Best not follow this to its natural conclusion.
Maxim readies the photograph on the table. My brother’s wife isn’t a ballerina. This isn’t her. This is no one I owe anything to. She is an enemy, a nonperson, she isn’t even there. I’ve airbrushed out Trotsky so many times that I know him by every mood and gesture, know him with the familiarity of a family member and have never felt regret, yet at the thought of erasing this single stranger something in me collapses over a hollow sphere of sadness.
Collect yourself, man.
“May I borrow your lighter?” Maxim asks, holding up a cigarette. I pass it to him and he lights his cigarette without taking his eyes from me.
He primes the airbrush and I load a gray-scale paint canister. Beneath brief exclamations of smoke he observes as I airbrush the stage over the disgraced dancer’s legs, the faces of the audience over the dancer’s slender torso. She falls, I have decided, into her partner’s hands. She looks away from the audience, to the camera positioned at the back of the stage, through the open aperture, to me, her final audience, as I erase her eyes.
It takes such artistry, such visual perception to disappear a figure into the backdrop. With a magnifying glass and a thin paintbrush, I expunge her waist from the furrows that widen between her partner’s spread fingers. I airbrush her arms until all that remains is her left hand, stenciled in spotlight, like a windblown glove dancing with a lonesome man, and I leave it there while I finish.
There are moments of intense creative pleasure: The dancer’s right leg obscures the face of an adolescent in the front row, and in its place I paint a postage-stamp portrait of my brother, Vaska, when he was that age. Over the last two years I have inserted him into hundreds of photographs and paintings. Young Vaskas. Old Vaskas. Vaskas in crowds listening to Lenin. Vaskas laboring in fields and factories. He hangs on the walls of courthouses, ministries, schools, prisons, even the NKVD headquarters, where if you look closely you will see Vaska glaring at Yevgeny Tuchkov, the man who made him disappear.
Do I worry I’ll be caught? Please. My superiors are too focused on who I take out to notice who I put in.
The dancer’s left hand still dangles in the air. My decision isn’t decided so much as felt. I set down the airbrush as one might set down a fork when nauseous. I will leave the disgraced dancer’s hand where it is, where it should be, right there, a single hand waving for help, waving good-bye, applauding no one, a single hand that may have once held my neck while a voice in my ear asked for help.
I slip the corrected photograph into a stack of a half-dozen others. Maxim flips through them as I clean the airbrush with an oil cloth. He grunts. Has he noticed?
“Is everything all right, Comrade?” I ask, unable to steady the shake in my voice.
He smiles warmly. Tusks of smoke slide from his nostrils.
“I was only admiring your work,” he says. “It’s so easy to overlook the beauty of what we do, isn’t it?”
We spend the afternoon working through the most recent box. When Maxim plods to the anteroom, I slip the photograph of the dancer from the stack. It’s irrational, a madman’s instinct, but what if her hovering hand is noticed? Will I be punished for my carelessness?
Maxim returns to the office before I can correct or return it to the stack, and I hide it in my lap. “Are you well, Comrade?” he asks. “You look feverish.”
I blot my forehead with my shirtsleeve. “Too much time underground, perhaps.”
Maxim nods and suggests we end early today. I nod, gratefully. Not knowing what else to do, I fold the photograph into my overcoat pocket. I am a dozen paces into the tunnel when he calls. “Comrade, I think you have forgotten something.”
The fever Maxim suspected suddenly feels real. There is no excuse for taking a photograph from the premises. The suspicion cast makes it a capital offense. I hold the doorframe.
“Yes, Comrade?” I manage.
Maxim eyes me. He knows. He knows.
“You’re growing forgetful, Comrade,” he says, and holds up my silver cigarette lighter.
AS CHILDREN in the years leading up to the Revolution, my brother and I played monarchists and revolutionaries, switching sides a half-dozen times before dinner. At night we rapped against the wall separating our bedrooms in the prisoner’s code invented by the Decembrists. The code arranged the alphabet into a graph of five rows and six columns. The tap for each letter corresponded to its row and column number. We wrote with sound on a wall that divided us no more than a letter divides sender from recipient.
By the time we were old enough to mistake ourselves for men, I’d already turned toward Bolshevism. Vaska found comfort in the Orthodox Church. We idolized the dead martyrs of our respective causes. One evening my comrades beat Vaska with such ferocity he nearly became one. His left eye had swollen shut and his nose bent at an awful angle when he entered my grandmother’s kitchen. I grabbed his hands. Only his knuckles were unbruised.
“You must run away when they come after you,” I told him.
“No, I must stay,” he said, glaring at me.
“Then at least put up a fight. This is shameful.”
He leaned forward, offering his busted face as evidence, and said, “Do you think this shames me?”
It was the last time we spoke. For many years after that, I believed that I knew so little of his life I would never betray him.
In August 1931, agents of the OGPU told me that Vasily Markin would be arrested within a fortnight on charges of religious radicalism. They told me my brother had married, that his wife was pregnant. They gave me his address. It was a test. It must have been. So much was lost in communications between raions that had I warned Vaska, had he fled Leningrad, he might still be alive. Had I done that, had the agents raided his apartment in the early hours and found him missing, they would have come for me instead — I believe this, I must, because if I begin to wonder, if I begin to think maybe they tipped me off as a professional courtesy, so that I could warn Vaska, if I begin to think…all roads in that direction lead to darkness.
That October, after the arrest, trial, and execution, the agents returned with a brown envelope. “Have a seat, Citizen,” the senior among them said, and gestured to my divan, where I’d just been eating dessert. I followed his extended hand, suddenly a guest in my own home.
The officers sat on either side of me, making the divan feel like the backseat of a Black Crow police van, and the senior agent opened the envelope and slid a photograph across the heat-ringed coffee table. If I gasped, it was from shock, from terror, from some dark thing rending inside me that might have been the birth pangs of remorse. I had corrected some thousand photographs in that year alone, but not one had I recognized, not one had I been part of.
The portrait the agent held out had been taken in 1906, on a Wednesday. My father, a haberdasher, had closed the shop that morning. He was well regarded, at least in haberdashery circles, having built his reputation on a pearl netting kokoshnik that had made a minor countess the talk of the Winter Palace ballroom. My mother did the bookkeeping, the restocking, the hiring of seamstresses — nearly everything, she felt, but placing the hat on the buyer’s head. She had grown up on potatoes and made sure her children grew up on meat.