“I’m not sure old photographs on a wall are the same thing.”
“Just because something’s not illegal doesn’t make it right.”
“Says the man with old photographs on his walls.”
His father responded by making a farting sound with his lips. Sergei flopped into the tea-stained armchair. He knew, of course, that his father had typed the name roman osipovich markin into the search engine, had left it there for Sergei to find. Neither of them could risk the vulnerability of a direct request; instead each had become sensitized to the intimations of the other. Sergei would make a suggestion and his father would refuse. The more adamant his father’s resistance, the closer Sergei felt to the raw nerve anchored so deeply in his father it may have been his soul.
“Go with me, Papa.”
“Never.”
Vladimir
A thick paste of July humidity plugged the spaces between Nevsky Prospekt traffic on the evening the temporary exhibition opened. Vladimir’s watch read half past seven. The sun, bright in the sky, warm on his face, said early afternoon. Too early, too late—Vladimir couldn’t tell anymore.
“Let’s go in,” Sergei said. They’d been circling the block for an hour. “It’s nearly over.”
At the corner, a spindly ice-cream vendor knelt and stuck his head in the freezer.
“You think a freezer does the job as well as an oven?” Vladimir asked.
“I think he’s just trying to stay cool.”
Vladimir scanned the street for another potential instrument of self-harm. It shouldn’t have been so hard. The most inconceivable deaths fell within the municipal borders of any major metropolis. Standing on a street corner in Petersburg should place one in mortal jeopardy.
Let me die before I pass the ice cream stand.
He passed the ice cream stand.
Let me die before I reach the blind man selling sunglasses.
He passed the sunglass stand.
Just ahead the gallery loomed. The polished door handle glinted. If he passed right now—a heart attack, a bolt of lightning—he would, in his last moment, consider himself spared from whatever awaited him inside.
Let me die before I open it.
He opened it.
A few attendees meandered through the exhibit. Vladimir would remember none of them. He would remember opening the door for his son, stepping into the cool gallery air, looking up to see the mug shot of his uncle, blown up two meters tall, staring directly at him. Roman Markin: 1902–1937.
“Are you okay?” his son asked.
He hadn’t realized he was leaning on Sergei. “I’m sorry. Your leg.”
“My leg’s fine. What’s wrong?”
“Nineteen thirty-seven. That’s when, that’s when I told my teacher that my uncle was a spy.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I thought maybe he’d go to jail for a few weeks, until he was found innocent. How could he be shot for something he didn’t do?”
“It was the middle of the purges. He was just unlucky, that’s all. You were just a boy, Papa.”
A woman wearing a long skirt and too much makeup approached. Raised relief scar tissue was mapped over her left cheek.
“I was just a snitch,” Vladimir said, and turned back to the mug shot. “A snitch.”
The name tag on the woman’s blouse read Nadya Dokurova, Exhibition Curator.
“Thank you for coming,” the curator said.
Uncle, he thought.
“We appreciate your interest,” she said.
Uncle, he thought.
“The museum is closing now,” she said.
Uncle, he thought.
“Is he okay?”
I don’t want to die.
“Sir?”
Not yet.
“Do you need a doctor, Papa?”
Not yet, son.
Sergei wrapped his arm around Vladimir’s waist to steady him. “I’ve got you,” he said. Vladimir let Sergei lead him to a wooden chair beside a tray of untouched cheese cut into damp cubes. The woman fanned his face with an exhibition catalog.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
Sergei gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. “Ask her what you need to,” he said. “You need to.”
What has happened to my asshole boy? Who is this wise man he has become?
“This censor, this Roman Markin—” Vladimir nodded to the enlarged mug shot taken in Kresty the night the censor was arrested “—tell me about him. Please.”
The curator peered at her watch and pursed her lips to a pale, uncertain point, but it was clear from the stack of unread catalogs, the untouched cubes of damp cheese, that attendance for the exhibition opening had been lackluster. Here, perhaps, were interested visitors.
“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 backgrou
nd, 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.
I wake.
Through the capsule’s stern portal, the sun is a coppery wink. But it is no longer the sun, only one star dissolving by degree into the gauzy sweep of the Milky Way, for the moment still polished brighter than the others.
A half billion kilometers past Neptune’s orbit, the vaporizer died and the cabin turned into a desert. Dryness unlike anything I’ve ever felt: a low acrid burn that makes my joints groan, makes my skin hold the shape of a pinch long after my fingers let go.
I sift through the dust for my forehead and press my finger to the skin. The pain is iridescent. I imagine the bruises in lush purples and crimsons, and wish for a mirror, if only to see those colors again. Turning toward the portal window, metal crinkles. Beneath my uniform, sheets of tinfoil hold my heat to my body.
To reach the end of the solar system I must have journeyed for years, but it feels as if I have only just arrived, just woken here.
The coughing resumes, more spirited than before. It is a point forever pressed against my trachea. The balaclava brings little relief. Goggles fastened from spectacles, foam, and duct tape shield my eyes. A postage stamp of skin unseals from my wrist and drifts into the air. I am turning to dust. Soon I will suffocate me.
Wiping again the glass, I peer through the observation portal but every point of starlight is small enough to snuff with a thimble. Beyond the titanium and thermal lining of the capsule hull, the temperature treads over absolute zero. Solar panels are winged on either side of the entry hatch. An emergency fuel cell stores enough energy to filter the air and eject the dregs once more, twice more, before reaching the Kuiper Belt.
Consider that last horizon line: the outer limits of the solar system, an elliptical orbit of frozen methane, ammonia, and rock. Even with an operational navigation system, the capsule couldn’t pass through. And if it could, what then? Consider the emergency fuel cell, the taste of filtered air. Consider how the last gasp of electricity might otherwise be used. I can breathe clean air again, for a bit longer, or I can power the onboard computer and play the mixtape.
THE cosmos began with the poster of the periodic table Father hung on the bedroom wall. Warm sunshine of halogens, deep indigo of transition metals: more color in those elements than the rest of the room. It stretched a pixilated rainbow between my bed and yours.
With his deep shaking bass, a ball bearing rattling in his voice box, Father described the bonded weight of protons, the unmappable orbits of electrons. You sat next to me on the floor in a legless chair and we listened to him explain that hydrogen, with one proton, and helium, with two, were the only elements naturally present after the Big Bang. They gathered into gaseous clouds that then turned into stars fusing protons at tremendous temperatures. Every element heavier than helium was forged in the nuclear reactions fueling stars, then launched across space in the flash of a supernova.
“Hotter than inside the smelters?” you asked.
“Millions of times hotter,” Father said. He pointed his cigarette to the twenty-eighth element and held it long enough for the atomic number to disappear within an ash-ringed hole. “The nickel smelted inside the furnaces was first smelted in stars.”
The list went on, Father enumerated: the lead in factory paint, the iron in barbed wire, the gold in the party boss’s teeth, the aluminum coins of counterfeiters, the sulfur in the air, the radon leaking beneath the police holding cells, they all came from supernovas.
That was the same summer we swam in Lake Mercury, and its mercury also came from supernovas, as did all its exotic chemicals, as did the magnesium in the Polaroid flash that froze you and me in our leopar
d-print bikini bottoms, our arms hooped around Mother’s colorless hips. Father had dropped the camera before it had spit out the photo and he lunged for Mother, roaring, and she screamed with a hysterical laughter on that sunny day below big burgundy clouds. What an improbable thing it was to be alive on Earth.
I FLOAT toward this forever night, this starlit amnesia. The nightmares ceased not long after the capsule passed the rings of Saturn. I no longer see visions. Perhaps I have become one. Through the observation portal, I watch the darkness that has dreamed me.
Alexei. The oblivion casts the name. I whisper it. I bring you back.
How long have I been dying? One hundred and twenty kilometers go by in the instant needed to articulate the thought. The watch on my wrist died long ago. And if I wanted, if I tried, what is time quantified by the revolutions of a dead planet around a receding star, what measurement of reality remains to me?
Take the blue pocketknife. Outline my left hand above the observation portal. Trace my fingers, the callused knuckles and tips, my hand the stencil. Thousands of other traced left hands cover the floor, ceiling, and walls of the capsule. I remember photographs of hands painted on cave walls and I sweep my palms across the scored surface. The carvings evidence a past outside the capsule of memory, the only proof that I do not belong to an eternal present tense.
When the dust grows dense enough to suffocate me, visibility will have dimmed to zero. The blindness through which the capsule drifts will have finally entered, will have finally won. Buried beneath the cabin floor rests the emergency fuel cell, coupled by red veins of wire to a circular button the shade of a robin’s egg nested on the instrument panel. Coiled in copper is enough energy to refilter the cabin air or power the cassette deck for a short while.
When I lived on Earth I would watch you sleep from my bed. You would listen to your headphones, propped on a pyramid of cushions. When you fell asleep, you would slump to the mattress and the cushions towered overhead. Once, I woke to your cries, a cushion fallen on your face. I turned on the lights and lifted the cushion. Your cheeks were wet plum flesh, a dampness war-painted in the hollows of your eyes.