“What if you’re thinking of the wrong people? This could have been an admirer of hers back when she was a young girl, and you’re just fixated on the war; you want to keep the shrapnel coming...”
“Nonsense! She’s got whole chains of events spelled out with these initials! Like formulas. You just listen. I’ll read it to you...hang on; let me grab the notebook...”
Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh—he shuffles off away from the phone, the heels of his loafers slapping against the floor, before I have a chance to say anything. If I end up not getting any shut-eye, Lolly will have to take the wheel in the morning. We’re having some serious fun with this night, the old man and I—catching up on all our unspent hours worth of talk at once. Or, to be more precise, it’s Granny Lina who’s having fun with us. How much longer does she have in her?
“Here.” Dad reappears noisily in the receiver, fumbling with something. I hear the rustle of pages being turned. “Here, found it! 1944—Grandma had a separate page for each year and, looks like, filled each page in gradually, as she recalled what happened that year. Here you go: Meeting Iv.—she means Ivan, your grandpa; she has him as Iv. throughout...then, capital B, Briefcase. That’s how they met, during a Nazi raid...”
“I know. Grandpa dropped his briefcase with leaflets into her arms, and she then carried them all the way home, right under the Germans’ noses, through the streets.”
“That’s right! And just after this briefcase, in parentheses, like a comment, she has G. with A.O. to, and then a cross, meaning death, then PZK and the date, in Latin letters—November 1943. P-Z-K—that’s an acronym, German most likely...PZ was how they referred to the police, K for Kommandant. But there’s a cross, too, which means it was a person, a Christian. Looks like a PZK died that November of ’43, maybe he was a German...they could have had a raid after something like that.... In any case, G. and A.O. were both there, and looks like it also involved a briefcase with leaflets in it...”
“Or a gun.”
This pops out of me totally by itself, as if someone else thought it. While Dad was talking, I was thinking of nothing, only saw the entry in Grandma’s notebook scrolling out before me like a news crawl on a monitor: Meeting Iv. Briefcase (G. with A. O. to † PZK. XI 1943).
She was going to write where she learned that trick with the briefcase: from G. and A.O. This is no cipher—just notes she made for her outline, which she, unfortunately, never fleshed out. But I have heard a story sort of like that before—about a briefcase, with a gun in it, and which, for that reason, needed to be gotten rid of, and also with the Nazis, and in the street, and in the middle of the day. Or did I see it in a movie?
“Or with a gun,” Dad concurs, rustling pages; he is focused on his own ideas. “Or here, here’s another one! 1947, October. G.’s last visit. This has a whole string of initials, and separately, among them, Ador lives—see, here she has Ador!”
“And who is this G.?”
“What do you mean, who’s G.?” he’s asks, stunned, taken aback by the depth of my idiocy. “Gela, of course!”
Sweet Jesus! Dad—he’s still working on preparing material for Lolly’s film—we never told him that the show’s over. He knows nothing—neither about the pre-election acquisition of Lolly’s channel by Russian investors, nor about Lolly’s unemployment. He only watches TV, so the only information he has is what they say on the air.
And how could I tell him now?
“You probably oughtta go to bed, Aidy,” Dad determines sympathetically, having interpreted my slowness in his own way. “You go turn in, and I’ll play around for a bit longer.”
As if I am still the eight-year-old boy who lost his mother, and he, who promised to be both Mom and Dad, is wishing me a good night standing in the door of my bedroom—before he goes back to the kitchen where he will stay up late solving the problems in the take-home math exams for well-connected students, the main source of supplementing his engineer’s wages. At eight, I could not yet understand that his promise to be both Mom and Dad meant not remarrying—and he did not remarry, he kept his word. Granny Lina did implant in him some of her generation’s unbendable resolve.
I would give anything to be able to hug him right now—to grab him in a bear hug and hold him close, my lonely, aging dad, who has podagra and diabetes and smokes too much, and has a wheeze in his chest, and flakes of dandruff on his jacket (when we went to film in Lviv last year it was Lolly who noticed it, said to me: you should tell your dad about anti-dandruff shampoo)—if he were here, that’s exactly what I would do, although our family has always been sort of ashamed of any displays of male sentimentality. Grandpa and Dad, caught in a fit of tenderness, would at most ruffle my hair, or slap me on the shoulder, meaning, it’s all good, pal, hang in there! And if he were here, it would’ve been enough, after we hugged, to slap him on the shoulder in silent understanding: it’s all good, old man...so he would know that I’m here for him, that he can count on me.
I know I’m not a very good son—although I’m considered to be good because I regularly send him money. But a good son—that’s not money, or even taking care of one’s father when he begins to need help. It’s having the balls to accept your father’s legacy and everything it means and make the honest payment for it with your own life—without trying to jump off that train. Maybe it takes time. Maybe it takes years and years to become a son—biology alone doesn’t cut it.
“I only asked you about this,” Dad explains apologetically, as the vision I had of him in his spot of light over in Lviv, backed by the bookshelves with old magazines and dusty pennants (pennants! I remember them now—the pennants! and the trophies—the trophies Mom won—that’s what’s up there on top!), now goes out of focus before my suddenly moist eyes, “because this Ador must somehow be connected with Gela, so I thought maybe Darynka could use it.... It might be important...and I don’t even know if it’s a man or a woman.”
“Probably a man,” I force myself to say. He doesn’t need to know anything; let him sleep easy (sleep, one little eye, sleep, the other). “Or. must be Orest, no?”
My voice sounds normal. Almost.
“Nope, can’t be,” Dad perks up. “If it’d been Orest, it’d be first! Grandma kept the same order of initials throughout; she’s always had ironclad order in everything! First the name, then the last name. Or. has to be the last name, but this Ad.... could be anything—Adam, Adela?”
“Adrian,” says someone else for me, in my own almost-normal voice—and I feel the unleashed word fly through the receiver like a rock thrown into a deep well, an incredibly deep well like a dark shaft...
cutting the air with a whine, and while I, above the curb, wait
for the sound of it hitting the water, cold goose bumps crawl up my legs...Whoosh!
A splash, bubbles, circles on the surface of the water, a slowing down of movement,
a change of medium, a passing into another time, “Forgive me, Adrian.”
Crackle, houlin, laik wind in ze wires.... Clicks, and somesin laik laik mashin gun shutin...
Miss Yulichka. Comrade-in-arms, my right hand, Mata Hari...
A fluctuation of air is all it is, I say to myself. Sound is simply fluctuations of pressure that fade exponentially because they cannot last forever: the first law of thermodynamics. The fluctuations cannot remain because they are not recorded on physical media—not anywhere. There is no virtual, open-access audio library of once-sounded voices out there. One cannot welcome visitors to a museum of children’s secrets.
I know all this. But I also know that “Ad.” is him. Adrian. The one after whom I was named. My godfather, in a certain sense.
I just know it, and that’s it.
“You’re right,” Dad says. “How did I not think of that?” And he instantly moves to the next level, like in a computer game, “In Temirtau, when she was pregnant, she kept saying to me, you’ll have a little brother, Adrian. She was so certain it would be a boy. And she was right, as it turned out.”
“And when you came,” Dad unspools his tale, “as soon as we got word we had a boy, she greeted you: Adrian! I can hear her the way she said it, now—it was like she...exhaled it. Sealed it.”
“Uhu.” What else can I say? That to name both her son and grandson after some unrelated guy, a woman must have once really wanted to have that guy be their father and grandfather? I don’t see any other reason—but maybe I don’t really know women?
She must have loved that man very much, my Granny Lina. Only he loved another—Aunt Gela, her precious sister.
“Now, Stefania, she wanted our boy to be Ostap,” Dad mumbles on like a somnambulist. “And if we had a girl, she wanted to name her Lesya. And I thought to name the kid after Grandfather—Ivas, or Ivanka.... But Stefania agreed with Grandma right away: Let it be Adrian! We could see it really mattered to her.”
Of course it did. Both in 1950, and then in 1970, when I was born, it mattered just the same. Twenty years changed nothing. In her own way, however she could, Granny Lina also spent her life trying to set right something that had not come to be. Something that was meant to happen—but did not.
“Do you have any idea who it might have been?” Dad asks. A touch fearfully, as it feels to me. Now he is the boy who is afraid of losing his mom: the image he’d had since he was little has suddenly come alive, like a statue that’s drawn a breath and is ready to leave its pedestal and set out in an unknown direction—and I bite my tongue before I let my ready answer roll off of it: I’ve seen him.
For a split second, the unspoken words billow out from my lips like bubblegum—and then burst inaudibly: poof, and they’re gone. And it’s not true, anyway, because I haven’t seen him—I’ve only seen pieces of footage from inside his head. (His later-to-be-exploded head.) My beloved has seen him. No, my wife—from the night the two of us dreamed the same dream, something has changed between us: she is now inside my life, like a part of me. Apparently, this is exactly how married people experience themselves. And this is the change Dad meant when he said I’ve matured.
“He died, Dad,” I say out loud. “In battle.” And because this sounds suddenly curt, as if I were suggesting that this dead man be buried and forgotten posthaste, I add, “At the same time as Aunt Gela. With her.”
“Oh, I see,” Dad sighs—relieved, it sounds to me. “Then it all makes sense,” and catches himself, “but how do you know?”
“From Daryna,” I say. Since that’s basically how it, in fact, is.
“She’s a trooper.” Dad reaches for the highest praise it was ever acceptable for a man in our family to give.
“Yep. Something like that.”
“Alright then...you go now, go to bed, son.”
He is letting me go—and I understand: he wants to be alone now with his newly gained knowledge, to roll it over in his hands, hold it up against the light, work it into his previously undisturbed picture of the past until he can’t see the seams. He might have to move some things around in that picture in order to do this; that’s not out of the question, things have to be cleaned up as always happens when one brings a new piece of furniture into a well-lived-in room. This is indeed work that takes time, and I understand him perfectly.
“You oughtta turn in too, Dad. The notebook can wait till tomorrow.”
“Uhu.”
But of course he won’t; he couldn’t possibly—he’ll go sit right back down and read it all over, picking out, with his new eyes, the A.O. and Ad. Or. from the web of Grandma’s acronyms, like one glowing light in a dead string. Who knows, he might get at something else this way, light by light...Lolly’s method.
“Thank you for calling.”
Wow, it really got to the old man.
“Don’t mention it. I’m sorry I don’t call as often as I’d like...been totally buried at work.”
If only you knew, Dad!
“Of course, of course, like I don’t know how it is,” he mutters on. “Sure, it’s a chore. Nothing to be done, though.” And, as if plucking up his courage, he exhales from somewhere very deep, all the way in his gut, “You’ve got to make your own buck, since your father left you no means!”
And this bursts with such fierce, ancient bitterness—like the pain of defeat, for years unmentioned—that it cuts me to the quick, makes me draw in air sharply, through my teeth.
“Dad, why would you say that? Did I ever ask you for any?”
And how exactly did you pull off the trick, I want to ask him, of keeping that unwavering old Galician mandate buried inside you well into your old age: a man must provide for his family! Some people these are? You’d think they didn’t spend their best years in slavery to the “Union unbreakable,” but lived somewhere in Switzerland or at least in their old prewar Poland, where there was no shame in owning a townhouse one paid for, because one could, still, honestly earn enough to pay for a townhouse instead of stealing it. How could they keep the two together—spend fifty years waiting for the Union to fall apart, and yet somehow believe the entire time that a man could live in it according to Grandfather Ambroziy’s standards—a man must provide for his family!—and not go rotten?
I could have also added that I know only too well who did manage (and how) to accumulate certain means for their children. I have to deal with these children of Soviet apparatchiks—the current politicians, government officials, and—less often—bank directors (few of them are smart enough to be in finance) much more often than he can imagine, because they are the ones who constitute the lion’s share of my clientele: they were the ones who, armed with their stolen capital, were the first to begin collecting what used to be my ancestors’ property. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve tried to remind myself that a collection, no matter who owns it, is always a collection—a way of preserving things that otherwise would have been destroyed, or the more valuable of them smuggled out of the country. And until the country, from which for centuries people have pilfered anything that wasn’t nailed down, learns to value its own inheritance, I can help to keep what has survived—twig by twig, crumb by crumb, like an ant—safe and at home. Despite all such self-comforting, this kind of clientele remains the most distasteful part of my job, and I try to separate, in my mind, the collections from their owners, and add to the collections for the collection’s sake, just so it’ll be there.
Or does Dad think that I somehow begrudge him not crossing the line to cooperate with the KGB, not growing fat and stealing his own share, with which he could have secured for me the opportunity to be doing physics now instead of making my own buck? Well, I don’t recall many offspring of the Soviet elites among our physicists; the few that dabbled in science have long split to rake it in at gazproms and naftogazes.
And God knows there is much else I could have said to him to make him stop feeling guilty for having honestly worked like a dog his whole life and not being able to provide for his son, because there is no fault of his in this—this is...it’s really beyond the pale. But a wall of my father’s deaf and stubborn silence rises in the receiver like a concrete dam—the kind of silence that deflects every possible argument well before it can be leveled; no words of mine can reach him. Any words I might say would be too small. It doesn’t matter that I never asked him for anything—he failed, in his own eyes, to fulfill the obligations he had taken upon himself. And I have no weapon or tool that could crack this petrified pain in him.
So I retreat.
“You ever think of cutting back on smoking, Dad?” is all I say.
“No worries!” he responds, unexpectedly chipper, apparently happy to hear the topic change. “You can’t fell me with an ax!”
“Yeah, that’s what you think...I can hear it all the way over here—‘the box of whistles playing,’ as Grandpa used to say.”
We exchange a few more routine lines—fading
fluctuations, an exponential process.... He’s right, it’s time to sleep. Now—I can feel it—I’ll go out cold as soon as I put my head on the pillow, just like Lolly did earlier. And will sleep like a log, without dreams.
“Tell Daryna,” Dad reminds me before he hangs up.
“About what?”
“About Adrian, what else?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure, I will.”
“Good night then. You all take care of yourselves now, okay?”
“You too, Dad. Good night. Sweet dreams.”
Click.
Beep-beep-beep...
I sit, holding the receiver, now mute, in my hands, and stare at it as if waiting for something else. A thought pops up—a last bubble of oxygen from the bottom of the well, stirred up by the rock: if I ever have children, I’d like a girl—they have it a bit easier in this world after all.
Dude, time to sign off, you’ve still got the whole day to figure out tomorrow. Or rather, the whole day today.
And the day after. And the one after that.
Alright. How do I get to my feet again?
From the Cycle Secrets: Untitled/Ohne Titel/Sans Titre
“Where did you get this?” Daryna asks.
“What?” the cuckoo yokel replies, half-spooked.
Just about had it wit’ dem all, he did. Dey’d come and talked up such a storm you couldn’t hear your own self think. Da other ones, dose come before, bought da clock and sideboard and wanted the other clock too, dat littler one over dere dat father brought from the war, when da wife put her foot down, said I ain’t gonna let you clean me all out—dey didn’t wag dem’s tongues for nothing, one-two, counted off the dollars, loaded up da things into dem van and gone oft! Dese new ones catechize you worse than cops, God forbid.
But, he’s no fool; he’s caught on to which way da wind’s blowing, right off. If not for dis skirt he’d seen on TV, he’d of told her boyfriend to go stick it and dat’d of been end of story. Wouldn’t of listened to nothing. Clear as day, he’s that antiques-Yulka’s boozer ex who’d called here before, and tried to get him. Da one who scared the daylights out of Yulka, so she asked to not come to her work and meet up in da park instead. Looks like he couldn’t suck anything off of Yulka no more, so he’d gone found him a new one.
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets Page 63
