“He was arguably the USSR’s most talented and productive censor,” she said. “His technical mastery was unrivaled. If he’d put his efforts into painting, rather than censoring, this wouldn’t be the first exhibit of his work.”
“Why was he arrested?” Vladimir asked.
The woman steepled her index fingers. “It’s unclear. In nineteen thirty-seven he was convicted on trumped-up charges that he’d been involved with a dancer in connection with a supposed Polish spy ring. A scripted confession appears in the court records, but witnesses to the trial have said that he refused to testify or confess.”
“But why? Who informed on him?”
She shrugged. “He worked for the state in nineteen thirty-seven. There’s no why about it. Work in a barbershop long enough and someday you’ll be the one getting your hair cut.”
He could have turned toward the door now. Sergei would have understood. Their silhouettes lay across the empty museum floor. The curator glanced at her watch, down to him, hesitated, then asked, “Feel like taking a tour?”
She took them along one side of the gallery, explaining the security apparatus’s awe for the power of images, the history of alteration and censorship, the India-ink masks, the early application and refinement of that postmodern tool of photographic manipulation: the airbrush. He leaned on Sergei. They passed a wall of men and women with inked-out faces.
In a side gallery, a painting of Rousseau’s jungle cat hung in a glass stand. He circled it: Stalin on one side, the leopard on the other. Beside it hung a nineteenth-century pastoral flushed with soft greens and yellows.
The curator was speaking and Sergei was nodding, but Vladimir didn’t hear them. A jungle cat parted wide fronds. Leaves as wide as dinner plates flopped overhead. A red sun shimmered.
“This is where it all began for me,” the curator said as she led them back to the main gallery. “This is the image the prosecution used in Markin’s trial. But it also contains one of Markin’s mysteries. Take a look. See if you notice anything odd.”
In the first photograph a hand floated over a stage. The original, unaltered image hung beside it, printed from a stray negative strip that had outlived the Soviet Union in a mislabeled file cabinet. Vladimir studied the dancer: dark locks flecked with spotlight; gray irises beneath the double arch of thin eyebrows; a laurel of dark feathers; ears rather average.
Irina Portnova was prima ballerina of the Kirov Ballet (today the Mariinsky) from 1932 to 1937, the information card read. Her career ended when she was charged with espionage, sabotage, and wrecking, as part of a Polish spy ring. If you look at Markin’s falsified version, you will notice that Portnova’s hand has been left floating above the stage. Is it an error? A warning to the viewer? An act of dissent? It’s difficult to say. Take a look at the background of both images. If you study them closely, you might detect the addition of a figure in the censored version where—
He turned to the altered photograph.
“Roman Markin did one remarkable thing,” the curator was saying. “Beginning in the mid-nineteen thirties, nearly every time he expunged a face from a photograph or painting, he inserted one.”
Your father is there, his uncle had told him, in the background, where no one can see him—where, uncle, where is he? Within the somber suit? Beneath the general’s epaulettes? No, no, no, no, no, until, finally, my god, yes, there he is, in the audience, gray-eyed, cowlicked, peaceful, alive. You thought you had forgotten his face. That he was lost. Expunged. Gone. But there. In the third row. He stares out. Not at the dancer. At you. To be here, at this late hour in your life, and to recognize your father, to find him, it makes the whole world you’ve wandered through feel as narrow as a blade of grass.
“If you walk along this wall, you’ll notice that this person appears in every censored image,” the curator continued. “The object labels will tell you exactly where. Sometimes as a boy, sometimes as a man, other times in old age. Often he is inserted in the space where the censored figure has been removed.”
“Who is he?” Vladimir barely got it out.
“I’ve been trying to answer that for years,” she said.
He moved along the wall at processional pace, leaning on Sergei’s arm. The photographs and paintings had been arranged chronologically — not by the date of their composition or alteration, but by the age of Markin’s inserted figure.
His father as a youngster, climbing aboard a tractor.
His father as a teenage revolutionary in a baggy brown jacket, sprinting through the October streets with a pitchfork raised.
His father dressed in a dark suit and navy cap, one arm around a woman who was, on closer study, Vladimir’s mother.
His father holding the hand of a five-year-old Vladimir.
His father as a scientist.
A politician.
A cook.
A peasant.
A farmer.
A builder.
A factory foreman.
A night guard.
A violinist.
A grandfather.
He watched his father age in the background of each image. His hair grayed and thinned to gossamer brushstrokes. His wrinkles drawn, then etched, then engraved in his sinking features. In the final painting, his father stood with a cane, apart from a crowd of cheerful factory workers, staring outward with a bemused smile. The man his father might have become resembled Vladimir.
Am I worthy? he silently asked the figure. It’s been such a long life — what have I done to deserve it?
He leaned into Sergei and for the second time that day Vladimir felt himself righted in the arms of a son who had, somehow, forgiven him, who now, somehow, sustained him.
“I know this is difficult,” Sergei said. “You’re doing so well. I am proud of you.”
Thank you.
The curator followed them to the last image. “It’s remarkable, isn’t it? If there was any goodness in Roman Markin,” she said, “it’s this man, whoever he is.”
The long century of his life converged upon this one vanishing point. He closed his eyes. He kept them closed. He opened them. “You have no guess who he might be?”
“A childhood friend?” she asked.
My father, he thought.
“A brother?” she asked.
My father, he thought.
“A son?” she asked.
His heart can hardly hold the moment.
“My father,” he answered.
Nadya
The dacha appeared ahead, the hill behind it. She declined her driver’s offer to carry her suitcase inside.
“Hello?” she called, but no one answered. She slid the suitcase into the hall closet without unpacking. She went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water, frowned at the stack of dirty dishes. Through the window, she watched her daughter spin down the hill, her arms windmilling until she rolled to a gasping halt. At the bottom of the incline, Ruslan glanced up from his open briefcase. He stood, stretched, and climbed up the hill with the girl. The late afternoon sun burned before them, inking them into silhouettes, framed in the pinewood of the kitchen window, the unknowing subject of a work of art only she could see.
She admired the scene for a moment, then walked out the back door to become part of it.
The End
OUTER SPACE, YEAR UNKNOWN
The explosion: a cataract of golden heat, a sudden, rising weightlessness. The dacha, stone fence, the well I lived in, the carefully tended garden, they all fall away as I am peeled from the surface of the planet. Little dill seeds scatter from my palm, constellating the sky.