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after, spending year after year in futile attempts to convince quite possibly the same people who had signed the orders he had come to protest that what they did was wrong. The entire narrative of his life, if we were to reconstruct it with documentary faithfulness—capturing all four folders and their knotted-to-death strings—had no point, only bitterness and waste. The point was in the epigraph, in the watermark. In a single, nearly straight line that was accidentally preserved.
    There was another reason I knew this to be true. Exactly a year before, on a summer vacation in Crimea, by Kara-Dag, I had sneaked away from the rest of our group and spent half a day climbing the same cliff again and again, like Sisyphus, and leaping into the water below. The day was still and smothering hot, and every time I climbed I sweated like a horse, and my knees buckled, and my heart clattered somewhere in my throat. When I was little, I once hit the water with my stomach and had been afraid to dive ever since.
    When I finally stumbled back into our camp at dusk, my legs twisted and turned under me as if I were hopelessly drunk, and it took all I had left to propel my body forward against the resistance of the air. My reputation as a daredevil, a thrill-loving adventure seeker who would do just about anything to get her adrenaline fix, had to have been carved in stone that night, and at dinner the men of the group couldn’t take their suspiciously twinkling eyes off me, apparently convinced that any of them could come up with much more pleasurable means of supplying me with adrenaline. A few of their wives turned unattractively skittish, which put a bit of a damper on the blissful intoxication I had achieved with the powerful cocktail of two substances that are so hard to obtain for a professional intellectual (Is that what I am? Can a journalist in our country be an intellectual?): utter physical exhaustion and pride in a job well done. “Whatever did you do this for?” asked the puzzled Irka Mocherniuk, the only person who really cared to know, and I said, “Not what for, but why.”
    I dove because I was afraid of diving. I spent half a day doing great violence to myself on an empty shore under the blazing sun because the fear, once driven deep inside, lived on somewhere in my body like an invisible iron shackle that wouldn’t let me move. I chipped at it with each dive, wore it thin and finally got rid of it. From that day on, my life held one less fear.
    My father’s note in the margins of that book helped me understand that he spent his whole life doing the same thing—climbinga cliff and leaping off. And not because he was some sort of natural hero, in fact, probably quite the opposite: he must’ve had to force himself do it every time. He had to break the shackles, to overcome “Hamlet’s hesitation.” At the beginning, he may have even believed that the whole case was a product of a high-ranking bureaucrat’s wickedness and, if someone could just remove this evil impulse, like a speck of dust from an eye, the terrible, criminal ruination would stop and he wouldn’t have to bear witness to what he called “the turning of a palace into a pigsty.”
    The Palace Ukraina was completed in the fall of 1970, and we went to the opening celebration as a family—this was the first palace in my life, a reality that finally gave shape to that fairytale word, something that matched the word’s dazzling radiance and incomprehensible, immeasurable scale, flooding the shallow lagoon of my child-sized imagination. Since then, Ukraina, the most palatial of all concert halls, was where I imagined all kings and princesses to live, because it was simply the best in its festive 1970 incarnation, grander than anything I’ve seen to this day—the Klovsky Palace was obviously not fit for even the poorest princess, and the Mariyinksy was still closed to the public. Ukraina was in an utterly different league than all those Soviet-era