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phrase, “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisivelyin sight of triumphing evilness.” I had no other key—no other trinket had slipped into my hands from the suitcase that had already been taken away from me—nothing that wouldn’t have turned into dust in the twenty years since Father died. So I pondered
this!!!
, so casual in the margin, like detective Columbo scrutinizing a set of uncommon tooth marks on a cigarette holder that he’d found next to the body; the only difference was I wasn’t looking for the murderer—I wanted to raise the dead.
    What the book was about I couldn’t tell you under threat of torture, but by the end of my necromantic investigation I became firmly convinced that my father’s long “struggle against the system” (as we Ukrainians have been calling it since 1991)—his desperate knocking on all those imposing oak doors; his countless letters, complaints, reports, and petitions to the Kyiv City Council, the Solicitor General’s Office, the Ukrainian Central Communist Party Committee, and the Central Committee in Moscow (three or four bulging folders, held by strings tied into dead, eternal knots and stored in Mom’s attic); his trips to Moscow, each of which was supposed to resolve things once and for all, only every time they sent his query back to Kyiv and he had to start the cycle all over again—the whole gory mess that replaced his life and that finally sent him to the loony bin with the then-typical political diagnosis of “acute paranoid psychopathy,” stemmed from nothing other than my father’s secret knowledge that he, too, shared, like a shameful disease, Hamlet’s damned hesitation to act decisively in sight of triumphing evilness. And when the evil imperial machine rolled by, almost but not quite brushing him, it was this knowledge that prevented him from stepping back, that compelled him to throw himself in its path, and made him do so, again and again, each time recapturing the right to self-respect.
    And I’m still convinced of it.
    The crippled, poorly written phrase turned out to be his watermark, an enduring epitaph to his life, which ended just as crippled: try and fit it into the format of a documentary story and you’ll have to close with a drawn-out physical decline—a dimmingconsciousness, struggling against the clamor of excruciating pain in every muscle caused by the rattling doses of insulin which the Soviet criminal psychiatry (as it later came to light) dispensed especially generously—and you’d have to show that hospital-issue robe, the color of cornflowers, which I remembered him wearing when Mom and I were finally allowed to come visit him in Dinpropetrovsk; and his skinny, yellow legs with bulging joints; and his stiff feet that stuck out from under the robe, like chicken feet from a shopping bag (enveloped in a well-aged sticky smell of urine or unwashed skin); and a slow, murky turn of dull eyeballs without a drop of reflected light, shriveled like an old man’s (signs of constant dehydration).
    None of this has any heroic or romantic potential, especially when we remember that this dragged on for years, and that’s completely unentertaining, which is why such things get swallowed by “Five years later” or, in somebody else’s case, “Twenty-five years later.” Really, you can’t expect anyone to keep watching that long! (There’s no other way to make this kind of story into a film, no way to touch the audience—which means there is no story, no pitch, as any producer will tell you, better luck next time.) That’s the rub: my father’s daily struggles, in and before the hospital, not the days of his research and teaching career, but his battle with what ended it, and then ended him—the floods of letters he’d sent, the useless appointments he’d gone to, the whole absurd and exhausting war that was lost before it had even begun because once engaged, the system would not and could not yield. And that’s exactly what he was