My Dead Parents

by Anya Yurchyshyn

  The majority of them were expats from America or Canada who’d come to Ukraine in the early nineties, but others were locals who’d worked with my father at the venture fund. The person I wanted to speak with the most was his driver Vitaliy, who’d survived the crash.

  My first week, I met with an American lawyer, Peter, who’d worked with my father at the National Bank of Ukraine. He’d come over at the same time and also left a family behind in America. When I asked why he’d come to work in Ukraine twenty years ago, he told me, “Your father and I grew up with a sense of victimhood, almost a survivor’s guilt. We thought, ‘We’re part of the diaspora; we have to go back.’ After a certain point in your career,” he continued, “you want to leave a mark. You think, ‘What can I achieve in my lifetime. What can I do besides being a banker?’ ” Returning to Ukraine and working toward its success during what everyone thought was a new era was an unexpected opportunity to make such a mark, one with great personal significance.

  He leaned forward and became more animated as he went on. “It was a challenging and scary place, but it was also incredibly invigorating. That’s part of the drive, too, asking yourself, ‘Can I do this?’ You had to adapt. You found out you had skills you didn’t know you had. It pulled you further away from your comfort zone, but no one ever achieved anything great in their comfort zone.”

  Peter and my father were very similar. “This,” I thought, “is probably as close as I can get to talking to my dad.” I believed that he’d felt as Peter had: challenged, powerful, and alive. When I visited Ukraine as a teenager, I couldn’t think of one reason why my father wanted to be there. Speaking with Peter, and others like him, allowed me to understand what I hadn’t been able to see. The tasks they’d been given, or had asked for, were huge, so even small successes felt momentous. They were a part of history. What could be more rewarding?

  “I can see why the environment was seductive,” I told him. “I’m drawn to ridiculous challenges as well.”

  “Obviously,” Peter said as he poured me tea. “You’re here.” He smiled. “Your father and I talked a lot about family. He was convinced he was doing something he had to do, but he did miss you. He loved you all very, very much. We talked about being torn, being gone, the sacrifice: Was it worth it, how do we explain this to our kids? I’m still asking these questions twenty-three years later. The older kids get it now, but they didn’t at the time. At the end of the day, you try to be true to yourself, do your best, and you hope that your wife and children will understand.

  “I have tremendous respect for your mother and the sacrifices that she made,” he added. “ ‘Stand by your man.’ Smart women realize they’re better off letting your husband do what he’s got to do, because you’ll probably save the marriage and you’ll probably save the family. If you fight ’em, like my first wife did, you end up losing everything. I lost everything.” He’d gotten a divorce from his first wife and had since married a Ukrainian woman, and they had young twins.

  “Your father’s death was a real blow,” he told me, “a real wake-up call. We realized this place wasn’t as benign as we thought it was.”

  He walked me to the elevator after we finished talking. “You have your father’s smile. He had a great smile. Everybody liked him.” I thanked him for the compliment, and for his time.

  I wandered back to the apartment, thinking about our conversation. I’d enjoyed it so much until he’d said that smart women let their husbands “do what he’s got to do.” That comment made me furious for my mother, Peter’s first wife, and all the women whose partners had left them to pursue their dream. The women weren’t given a vote—they were told what was happening. And the men were only able to do what they did because someone was taking care of their children. I didn’t know if my mother fought with my father about being in Ukraine, or if she only expressed her frustration and loneliness in boozy outbursts, but I knew she hadn’t saved her marriage—it had ended anyway, when my father died. She hadn’t divorced him, but she’d lost everything.

  When my father went to Ukraine, there was nothing in my mother’s life that she found exciting or challenging. The imbalance of their lives—the emptiness of her days, the fullness of his; his fresh start, her inertia—echoed dated patterns of male entitlement and sexism that I imagined she must have wanted to avoid. I was determined to avoid them myself. Fears of having my freedom curtailed by obligations and of being expected to “stand by” someone instead of pursuing my own goals in the same way were huge factors in my persistent distrust of marriage.

  With the help of one of my father’s coworkers who was still in Ukraine, I got in touch with Vitaliy, and he agreed to come over for tea. I asked Larissa to act as a translator. She arrived with a bag of pastries and arranged them on a plate as I reviewed the information I had about the crash, which I’d gathered from the few newspaper articles about it. Because it was in print, I took the following as fact: As my father, his coworkers, and Vitaliy were returning to Kiev after a day-long visit to a printing facility in Cherkasy, a small city south of the capital, a van veered into their lane on an unlit portion of the road near Kiev and collided with their vehicle. Vitaliy swerved left, and the van hit the passenger side. My father was killed on impact. The other passengers, Serhiy and Yelena, two Ukrainians in their late twenties whom my father was grooming for higher positions at the fund, died soon after. The driver of the van was a construction worker in his thirties; he and his passengers were not seriously injured. Neither he nor Vitaliy were found to have been drinking.

  I was fluffing a pillow when Vitaliy knocked. I greeted him in Ukrainian and he greeted me in English. He laughed when I insisted on hugging him and kissing his cheek. He was short, with white hair and a friendly smile. After I made tea, we settled into the living room and chatted, with Larissa’s help, about my sister, his family, and the time he’d spent working for my father.

  Vitaliy explained that he’d started working as a driver for my father when he was still with the National Bank of Ukraine. As my dad was setting up the venture capital fund and then began working for it full time, Vitaliy also became his assistant, running errands, dealing with the office, and securing various permits.

  I figured that he expected me to bring up the accident, but I was worried about how to do it. I wasn’t sure how comfortable he’d be discussing something so traumatic. But he brought it up himself after mentioning the printing company they’d visited the day of the crash.

  “We were returning very late from a routine visit,” he told me. “There were four people in the car: George and two investment officers—Yelena and Serhiy—and myself. It was at one a.m., and we were almost in Kiev. It was a holiday, Ivana Kupala, to honor the summer solstice. People who had been drinking were driving toward us and drove into our lane, and it happened. There was simply no time. There wasn’t room to brake because we were going eighty kilometers an hour.

  “The thing that saved me was that George always buckled his seat belt. I sometimes used it, sometimes didn’t, but he always said, ‘Vitaliy, better buckle up.’ And that’s what saved me. The two people in the back—”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “You said that the people in the other vehicle were drinking. Was the driver drinking as well?” When he didn’t answer, I read from The Eastern Economist’s front-page article about the crash. “Both drivers were checked for blood alcohol content several hours after the incident, and neither registered as having been drinking.” I looked at Vitaliy. “Do you think he was?”

  “First of all…” He sighed. “When they did the blood alcohol content, the results disappeared. Then there was another analysis, a repeat analysis.”

  “What do you mean, they disappeared?”

  “They were gone. The other driver was, by the way, a former policeman. He left the scene very quickly. A car drove up and they got in it. They didn’t even wait for the police. He really broke the
law.”

  “This article says that the driver of the van was a ‘reinforced concrete worker.’ If the other driver left, how would anyone know who he was, or if he’d been drinking or not? How did they find him? How did they figure out that he was a former policeman?”

  Instead of answering my question, he said, “There were a lot of inquests and examinations, and the case was transferred.”

  “But he went to jail.” I stared at him. “Right? Three people died as a result of the crash.”

  “No,” he said before quickly revising his answer. “The investigation lasted a long time. Honestly, I don’t know how it ended.”

  My voice went tight. “Did the other driver go to jail or not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I’d been cruising until that point, but after hearing that, I felt I’d collided with a van myself. My ribs hurt, my head throbbed. I’d never thought about what happened, or didn’t, after the crash. I pressed Vitaliy for more information. “You must have been a part of the investigation,” I said. “How do you not know what eventually happened?”

  He shifted in his seat. “The driver disappeared, and that’s it. Get it? They didn’t suffer much damage. They did not wait for the police, they just turned and drove away.”

  I glanced at Larissa. She repeated what he’d said. I told him that I got it, but I didn’t. I hated that I couldn’t speak to him directly. There was no way Vitaliy didn’t know what happened with that case; claiming ignorance made me think that the other driver had managed to evade conviction. But that line of questioning didn’t seem like it was going to produce answers, so I moved on to the question I’d most wanted to ask. “Do you think it was possible that the crash wasn’t an accident?”

  He shook his head. “George did not have enemies here,” he said firmly. “He was a very sincere person. If somebody needed something, they turned to him. He never refused if he could help. And nobody knew where we were. We were supposed to spend the night in Cherkasy. But George had something to do the next day, and he said that we had to be in Kiev by morning. And the other vehicle was driving from some party, maybe singing songs, I don’t know, but they obviously distracted the driver, and that’s why it happened.”

  I said, “Do you remember the accident well?”

  “I remember this incident very well,” he said. “This kind of thing happens only once in one’s life.”

  “You had to see my father, Serhiy, and Yelena. You saw their bodies.”

  “I saw them. With your father, the lower part of his body was damaged, because he was pressed against the dashboard. The top part was almost not damaged.”

  “I would have thought he would have hit his head, too.”

  “No, no, the head not at all. There was no damage. Almost. Maybe a little, yes.”

  “Was it obvious that they were dead? I’m sorry to ask these gruesome questions. You’re the only person who knows these things.”

  “George died right there. He simply…as I now remember…how a person takes in air, and he let it out and that was it.”

  Breath. He was describing breath, the last one that my father took. It should have been difficult for me to hear this information, but it wasn’t because I was so upset about everything else I’d learned. A possibly drunk ex-cop fleeing the scene, a lengthy investigation, resolution: unknown. How was all this twenty-year-old information new to me? Would it have been new to my mother?

  The crash was an accident. My biggest question had been answered. But I didn’t feel relieved or at peace; I had so many new questions about what had or hadn’t happened afterward. The driver who killed my father and two other people had probably walked. That was almost as bad as learning that my father had been murdered.

  I lurched through the rest of the conversation. Vitaliy and I made plans for me to meet his wife and sons. They spoke English better than he did, he explained, and it would be nice for us to share a meal.

  We hugged and kissed when he left. I told him that for my sister and I, he would always be like family. He nodded and thanked me.

  I locked the door behind him. Larissa and I looked at each other. “What the fuck?” I mumbled as we went back to the couch. The newspaper articles I’d used to guide me weren’t factual at all. My father and his coworkers had been killed by a drunk ex-policeman who’d likely walked.

  I looked at my notes and tried to figure out what I’d learned. Vitaliy said the other driver didn’t go to jail, but he also said he didn’t know how the investigation had ended. “He said that the people who’d caused the crash had driven away in their van, then later said that they were picked up by another vehicle.” My mind started to focus. I remembered my sister telling me that our father’s skull had been smashed; Vitaliy had said that it wasn’t damaged, then said it was. I asked Larissa unanswerable questions and tried to piece together a satisfying story from what I’d been told. I couldn’t. I agonized about not pushing Vitaliy further and failing to make him commit to answers.

  “I don’t think he’s lying,” I told Larissa. “But I don’t think he’s telling us everything. Maybe that means he is lying.”

  I wanted more information about the investigation of the accident but had little idea how to get it. I needed help, and I was willing to pay for it. I googled “Private Investigator Kiev” and read multiple agencies’ websites before deciding they were a last resort; I worried how I’d know if they were trustworthy. I reached out to my Eastern European friends to see if anyone had connections with local lawyers or law enforcement.

  The next day, a high-school friend put me in touch with Hilb, an ex-cop who’d transitioned to working in HIV prevention. Hilb said I should hire someone to act as a private investigator, and that he knew the perfect person for the job. Her name was Galya, and I could meet them both that afternoon.

  I met them in the lobby of a hotel where they were attending a conference. Hilb carried himself like a military man and had a friendly smile. He introduced me to Galya and explained she was a lawyer who worked with HIV-positive women in prisons; she had a lot of police connections. Galya’s shiny brown hair fanned past her shoulders. Her bangs were pinned back like a girl’s, but her mouth and stare were hard.

  I opened a manila folder and spread out on a coffee table the few documents I had about my father: the articles about the crash, his death certificate, a letter from the American embassy. I explained what I had learned so far. I told her about Vitaliy and said he’d probably be willing to speak with her. I knew, I said, that the crash happened twenty years ago, that there were no computers then, and that the people involved might not even be alive. But I needed to find out as much as I could.

  Hilb and Galya looked at each other, then at me.

  “Why?” Hilb asked.

  “Which part?” I said.

  “Why do you need to know what happened?”

  “Because,” I stammered. “This was my father. I should know what happened with his case and to the person who killed him. What if it wasn’t handled properly, or the other driver was able to avoid punishment?”

  They looked at me with an expression that said “Yeah? So?” There was none of the compassion I got when I talked about having a dead father in America, or the shock and outrage I thought I’d see on someone’s face if I said there was a chance that his killer had gotten away with it.

  “I can help,” Galya said in thickly accented English. “Maybe.” She told me that there was an official way to request information from the police, but it was not the best way.

  Hilb agreed; it was the worst way.

  Galya said, “If they know you are looking, and something is there, then that thing is not there anymore.” She waved her hands to indicate how things might disappear, and I noticed that she was missing half a finger.

  “If something’s even there,” Hilb added.

  “It is very p
ossible there is nothing. But if I talk to the people I know, say I need a favor, make things a bit easier for them, maybe they can get information.” She paused and looked at me. “I have to make them want to help.”

  “Yes,” Hilb said. “With favors, that is important.”

  It took me a moment to understand that “making things a bit easier” meant offering bribes. I said that I was willing to do whatever was needed.

  Galya said that she knew someone in the precinct where my father was killed, and that she was going down there in a few days. She could start there.

  I was excited; something was happening. I grinned, but she didn’t smile back.

  Galya grabbed a pink cane I hadn’t noticed and steadied herself with it when we all stood to leave. I told them I was going to call a cab, but Galya insisted on driving me home even though, she said, it was out of her way.

  She told me about her work in the prisons as she careened through Kiev in her Mercedes SUV. Every time I asked her a question or responded to something she said, she hunched over the steering wheel and said “No!,” which I took to mean that I hadn’t understood her. I decided to just repeat a portion of whatever she was saying so I didn’t piss her off or sound too stupid, though this approach made me sound, and feel, plenty dumb.

  She said her work was very difficult, very awful.

  “Very difficult, very awful,” I said.

  She cursed at other drivers and told me again that she was going out of her way, and, she added, during rush hour. I said, “Rush hour,” then, “Thank you.”

  She dropped me off a few blocks from the apartment, too annoyed by the traffic to take me all the way. I tried to hug her, but she kept both hands on the wheel, so I squeezed her shoulder and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek.

  She flinched. “I try,” she said, then motioned to my door. “Get out.”

  A few days later, I met with a Ukrainian American woman who’d started a venture capital fund around the same time as my father. She’d thought she’d only be in Ukraine for few years, but she stayed for twenty and raised her two daughters there on her own.