The last week of my trip, I hired a driver named Oleg to take me to the area where my father had died. I explained what I wanted to do and gave him the location as it had been reported. He said he could take me, no problem.
He picked me up outside of the apartment in a freshly waxed black car. He was smoking when I trotted over to him, but threw down the cigarette when I extended my hand.
As we drove out of Kiev, the city thinned into sprawl, long avenues of small stores and people selling fruit and socks on the sidewalk. I told him about my father’s accident, then interrupted myself. “Flowers!” I cried. “I need to get flowers. Is there somewhere we can stop?”
He pulled over under a pedestrian bridge that spanned the wide highway and parked in front of a woman selling cherries and pale carrots. He ushered me down a flight of stairs that led to an underground arcade of tiny shops.
There were many stalls selling flowers, but he brought me directly to a large one in back. I walked around and examined wreaths made out of lilies and carnations as Oleg followed. I wanted to get something dramatic and reverential. When I found a wreath I liked, I asked a saleswoman how much it cost.
Oleg interjected before she could answer and led me to a tall bucket of red carnations. “There are the flowers people bring to graves and places like that. You need to have an even number in your arrangement since it’s for death. In other circumstances, having an even number of flowers is bad luck.”
The carnations looked cheap, but I wanted to do what was traditional. I carefully selected ten of the brightest ones and brought them to the counter.
“See,” Oleg said, as the saleswoman wound a black ribbon around then. “She knows what they are for.”
When we got back in the car, Oleg told me he didn’t like the road my father was killed on. “My neighbor’s husband died on this road. Many people die in cars all over the country. But this road, it’s very bad. No lights, too many cars, crazy drivers. I try to never take it, even during the day.”
The road turned into farmland as we got closer to the airport. Both sides were lined with fields and dotted with shrines commemorating the many people who’d lost their lives traveling it.
He slowed down right as we hit the two-kilometer point. “It is here,” he said, turning the car around and pointing it toward Kiev. “Where the road turns, that’s where it is easy for cars to move into the wrong lane. I think it probably happened there.”
I grabbed the flowers, then waited for traffic to whiz past. It was a bright, hot afternoon.
I ran across the road, then slowed down as I moved through a knee-high mess of bushes toward a line of trees that fronted fields of dead sunflowers. When I stumbled over a rock, a flock of brown birds erupted from the ground.
After surveying the trees, I went to the one with the widest trunk. “Hi, Dad,” I began. I paused to see if tears would come or my throat would tighten, but neither happened. “I’ve been here for a month, almost. I learned a bunch of terrible stuff. I’m really angry that the person who killed you got away with it, and I feel so stupid that Mom and I didn’t even know. I’m sorry you were stopped when you were doing something that made you so happy and that you believed was important. You’d hate things now. I don’t mean it’s better that you’re dead, just that you’d be disappointed. But I don’t think you’d give up. You’d probably work even harder. I still don’t feel that sad that you died, because things were awful between us. I wish you hadn’t been so scary, and that you could have been yourself with me, or more like the person other people knew.” My voice sped up when it hit that truth. A car honked behind me and another honked back. “We have a lot in common. I think we’d understand each other now.”
A breeze sprang up, lifted my hair and edged under my clothes. The air was different there; it seemed active, charged. Dead leaves floated inches above the grass. I lay the flowers at the base of the tree, then left.
As Oleg drove us back to Kiev, I said goodbye to Ukraine, although I wasn’t leaving for a few more days. This was my father’s country. I didn’t know how to love such a complicated place, just as I didn’t know how to love such a complicated person. But it didn’t matter if I loved them or not. They were part of me, either way.
Back in Brooklyn, I reviewed what I’d learned and settled on the story Galya got from the retired police officer, who died a few months after she spoke with him. I felt I was done. The crash was an accident. With the help of colleagues and money, the ex-cop had been able to stop the investigation and shirk responsibility. The only people imprisoned were the families of the victims, still walled in by their grief for those they’d lost and a system that protected only itself.
I was satisfied, but Galya was not. She was still stuck on something Vitaliy had told her. He said the case had been reopened in a different precinct and that there had been multiple investigations. She’d looked at the registers at each precinct and saw the case had been archived in the precinct where the accident occurred. That meant the file should have been there, but it wasn’t. If it had been reopened or transferred, there should be a paper trail. She’d hadn’t found one.
She told me that the police chiefs all knew one another and that it was common for them to “cover their own.” The officer she had spoken with, she said, was the sort who would never reveal the whole truth. He told her a story, said he was guilty, and that he was sorry. But, she reminded me, a person could say anything. You could believe any story you wanted, but documents told what really happened.
When I said we already knew that some, if not all, of the documents related to the case had been destroyed, and that any she found would probably contain false information, she said she still needed to look. She should be able to find something. She wanted to speak with her acquaintance who worked at the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the official counterintelligence and surveillance organization that grew out of the Russian State Security Committee (KGB). She hoped he’d agree to look in their archive for documents on my father and the accident. If something was there, he would find it. She didn’t ask for money and hadn’t for a while.
I didn’t hear from her for months and assumed that her acquaintance hadn’t found anything. So when I received an email from Larissa saying she’d spoken with Galya and that there’d been a big development, I was surprised. Larissa said she wanted to share it with me in person, and that she’d be in Connecticut in a few weeks for Easter. I refused to wait, and she reluctantly agreed to talk by Skype while she was still in Ukraine.
I sat in my room with my computer on my lap. As she looked at her keyboard, Larissa said that Galya had visited her a few days earlier and had explained that she hadn’t been in touch because she’d contracted hepatitis C. While she was in the hospital, her acquaintance from the SBU discovered that Vitaliy had worked for them and for the KGB as well, reporting on a number of people, including my father. This wasn’t surprising. All Westerners in Ukraine were under observation in the nineties—my father probably had assumed that Vitaliy was reporting on him if he didn’t know for sure. His phone was tapped and he sensed people listening to his conversations in restaurants and elevators; foreigners were innately of interest, but being watched didn’t mean you were doing something wrong.
Galya’s friend and a companion staked out Vitaliy for months before they finally saw him on his street. They followed him into his house, where they interrogated him and beat him up. Eventually, he’d admitted that the crash was a hit, but said he did not know who’d ordered it or why. Refusing would have cost him his life. He said the accident had been staged and was not a head-on collision as had been reported, but did not say what actually happened.
I blinked at my screen. That the crash could have been a coordinated hit had been believable for so long, but now it seemed impossible, even absurd. As I turned over what Larissa said, I began to panic. I’d justified my participation in Ukraine’s pervasive
shadow economy by telling myself that bribing people was the only way to get things done. I was told there was a formal way to investigate an old criminal case but that it was not the “best way,” and I’d chosen, without even a moment of hesitation, to work outside of the rules and pay to learn what I wanted to know. I hadn’t condoned the country’s corruption, I told myself, just used it to my advantage. But I’d participated in the same system that helped the person who’d killed my father avoid punishment. And my questions, slick with money, had led to more violence.
If Galya had told me that her guy was going to speak to Vitaliy, I would have insisted he not use any physical force. Since it had been employed, could I trust the confession? Maybe Vitaliy told them what they wanted to hear so their interrogation would end. Confessing didn’t have any repercussions; he could no longer be brought to trial.
I threw these doubts and more at Larissa. How could the accident have been coordinated in the middle of the night? If Vitaliy had played a role in my father’s death, why would he meet with me? “What if this isn’t the truth?” I groaned.
“Why would he lie?”
“Because he was scared! I’m not saying he did, but how can we actually trust this confession. Galya wasn’t even there!”
“Vitaliy is the only living witness, and we know that he is capable of telling different things to different people. We know that what was in the articles wasn’t true, and he said that the accident didn’t happen as it was reported. He could have driven into the other car and swerved to protect himself. Maybe the police officer who helped bury that case was just a part of a larger cover-up. He told Galya he never questioned his orders. He could have had no idea what was actually going on.” Larissa’s jaw tightened with frustration as she continued. “You aggressively pursued the truth, and now you’re rejecting it.” She told me that I had to stop viewing Ukraine with my American expectations. This was how it worked.
Out of arguments, I said goodbye and closed my computer. Larissa was right. I’d gone after the truth, and now I was determined to discredit it. But wasn’t that the right thing to do? Staging accidents was a common way to get rid of people at the time. It seemed so unnecessarily complex, as it killed more people than it needed to, but the more complicated the crash was, the more likely it was to be seen as an accident, and it would arouse less suspicion than other tactics, such as shooting my father, an act that could not have been seen as anything other than murder.
I flipped open my computer and wrote an email to Galya. My fingers were heavy and fast, their taps sounded like gunshots. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m hoping you can tell me if you think that the confession Vitaliy gave your friends is real. I understand that when they spoke with him, they used physical force. Couldn’t that have influenced what he said?”
She replied the next day. “The people who talked to Vitaliy are not my friends. They were doing their job. There was physical pressure. Vitaliy is not an honest man. It’s impossible to talk to him adequately without pressure. Vitaliy himself didn’t decide to kill. At that time, drivers who worked for people in high positions (your father was one) all went through the KGB/SBU. I told Larissa all this in detail. What other information do you need?”
I needed, or wanted, so much more information. I wanted to be as certain as Galya that Vitaliy was guilty of at least carrying out orders. She’d ignored my question about believing him, which meant she thought that I should, too. She didn’t respond to questions that she felt had an obvious answer.
I wandered my room thinking about all the times I’d said my father’s death was a gift. That I didn’t care how he died. The circumstances of his death seemed so insignificant that I wasn’t even sure if I’d ask people about them when I began my research. My interest was only spurred by other people’s interest, and by their doubts.
It was scary to think of how close I’d come to never knowing the truth, and how comfortable I’d been with that possibility. I still believed that if he’d lived, I’d have been too afraid to push myself to discover how smart and capable I was, but I could no longer feel happy that he’d died. And I had to acknowledge that my mother’s suspicions turned out to be true; they weren’t the product of grief-fueled paranoia or a need for sympathy. She was smart to question the story we were given.
I took my passport from my dresser and rubbed its curled edges. I could fly to Ukraine that night, demand Galya or her associates take me to Vitaliy, and question him myself. I grabbed my suitcase from the closet and tossed it on the floor. I threw a pair of jeans in it, then stared at them. What would Vitaliy tell me that he hadn’t told Galya’s men? What would change if I could hear his confession myself and stare at him while he spoke? I might not even be able to find him; he could have left town, disappeared. And if I returned, I risked putting myself, and Larissa, in danger.
Feeling defeated, I collapsed on my bed and surveyed the piles of papers that stretched across the floor. They were the same piles that I’d created years ago, but the bedroom was different, as was the apartment. I’d moved many times since I’d first examined and organized my parents’ things, had unpacked their letters and photographs in different homes, states, and countries, then packed them up again when my search took me to another destination. They’d told me everything that they could, but there was still so much that I wanted to know. If my father hadn’t died, would we have found a way to heal our relationship? Would he have apologized for how he’d treated me, and would I forgive him? Who would I be now, and what would have happened to my mother?
I picked up one of my father’s early letters to my mother, then quickly put it down. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to delight in their young love without thinking of its shaky progression, cheer for their optimism but not lament all that choked it, read about their travels without seeing the limited existence my mother retreated to.
Because I thought that my parents never really cared for each other, I’d believed that if my father had lived, my parents would have divorced, or grown further apart even if they’d remained linked on paper. But I’d been wrong. Perhaps the promises my father made to my mother would have become more important than the ones he’d made to himself, and he’d have returned to America and fought with her to restore her life and their marriage.
When I began investigating their lives, I thought only about getting answers. I didn’t consider how I would feel when I got them, or what it would be like to live with the knowledge that they’d been in love, that I was so much like them, and that my father had been murdered. Embracing my parents, their love and catastrophes, meant embracing their pain as well as my own. Acknowledging who I’d lost and all we’d failed to understand.
I placed their letters in a folder, and that folder in a box. Pictures went into bags, and documents were slid into an accordion file. As the piles disappeared, I thought of how relieved I’d been when my mother died, how I’d believed that cleaning out her house would be my final goodbye to my parents and the end of our relationship. It turned out to be the beginning of a new one—one that was vivid and complicated, frustrating and rich. It was the relationship I needed, and the one that I wanted.
How often did my parents see each other’s best qualities, the ones I’d learned about? They’d seen them when they first met, but these qualities seemed to recede with time. Perhaps my parents stopped noticing what they’d once loved about each other because they lost the ability to truly see someone they’d come to know well or because they’d squashed those parts of themselves when their lives didn’t require them. Maybe they were still able to be those people when they were abroad, far from their responsibilities. When my parents returned from trips, I didn’t recognize them. But this didn’t mean they weren’t happy and authentic in those moments or hadn’t been while they’d been elsewhere.
When I found my parents’ letters, I had to surrender the people I’d constructed from my experiences, observations, a
nd assumptions so I could meet them for the first time. Often I felt overwhelmed by all I didn’t know; more frequently, however, I was frustrated by the fact that I’d never be able to know everything that I wanted to. I’d said I wanted to be rid of my parents, and I was. I’d replaced them with Anita and George.
Wanting to know them better was the way I expressed and dealt with my grief. It didn’t look like other people’s. I wasn’t sad that my parents were dead, but I was devastated to grasp that I didn’t know them and had never understood who they were or all they’d done. If I truly didn’t care, I wouldn’t have upended their lives, and mine as well, looking for answers. I would have let us be. I fought to learn who they were, though I knew that it was almost impossible for children to truly know their parents. Children are just one part of their parents’ lives; kids cannot understand their parents’ depths and dimensions, and parents often cannot be or share all that they are with the young people in their charge.
I didn’t expect the pain I’d encounter. The good things I discovered made me feel sad, while the sad things I discovered made me despair. When I read the diary that my mother kept before and after Yuri’s death, heard about my father’s breakdown upon losing his son, or revisited my mother’s self-slaughter, I grieved. Hard. I wept for everything that Anita and George lost, and for the girl I’d been, a trembling child who didn’t have the parents she needed.
My parents had fallen in love and committed to sharing their lives with the audacious optimism that compels many couples. They didn’t know about the blows they’d suffer as individuals and as a pair, or the sudden end of their relationship. If I’d asked them, at the end of their lives, if they would have chosen someone else, would they have? Or would they tell me that what they’d suffered with each other was not greater than the beauty they’d experienced as well?
My Dead Parents Page 27