they finally showed up, your father’s fear came to pass, because fear—it always reifies in the end. They burst inside the four family walls like a tornado with a luscious creak of leather holster belts and a vigorous outdoor wind behind them and suddenly filled the room to capacity: three huge males, rosy-cheeked from the sub-zero temperatures, slapping the covers of their identity cards, “pack up, let’s get going!” Father scurried around looking for papers, sorting something on his desk, hands trembling, stunned and pathetic, and then you jumped out at them from the corner of the room, pimply pale-green adolescence trying to unbend its back—squelched and squeaky, long bangs swinging across your nose, you screeched: “How dare you, what right do you have!” It didn’t come off too well, actually it came off not well at all, the guys shut you up as easily as kicking a puppy aside with one foot (young junior officer, moustache the hint of a thin line was trying real hard, piece of fucking shit on his first responsible assignment—no piddly matter, catching a real-live anti-Soviet!—“not your business, sweetie, you’re a little young for this, aren’t you?”). And anyway, your parents, dark-faced with terror as though someone had slipped Polaroid paper under their skin, began hissing-shushing-flapping long before you even rushed forward. But the first failure didn’t stop you, because it’s true what the man said, you’re a brave woman, that you are, sweetness. Some years later, as a student in the eighties out on a date with the latest cutie-pie, you decided to head for the theater with a group of friends to see some hit show in from Moscow. Just a random attempt since nobody had tickets, laughing your heads off the whole while, quips flying back and forth like snowballs, you began storming the ticket office with a mob of similar revelers, the crowd having grown quite sizable by then: New Year’s Eve after all, you’re young and alive and who wants to go home and that’s when the cops showed up—a squadron of paddy wagons revved up, gray coats plowed into the throng sending furrows of breaker waves crashing in all directions and who the hell even knows how it happened, just a moment ago there you were, well, having fun—so, if you hadn’t gotten in, big deal, you would have headed over to Khreshchatyk for a cup of Turkish coffee! When suddenly there was cutie-pie’s friend, the most persistent of the bunch, light and slippery as quicksilver—in fact, one more push and he just might have squeezed into the theater!—there he was, identified and fished out from the huddled, bellowing herd and now being dragged under the arms by two gorillas in uniform. He couldn’t even reach the asphalt with his feet, the rest of your coterie followed in confusion, not having the foggiest of where to begin, and he was already whining to the gorillas: “Come on, guys, let go of me, let me go, please, come on, guys,” legs twisting in the air independently of his torso, and your cutie-pie, dumb jerk, shuffled behind like a somnambulist mumbling—“It’s okay, they won’t do nothing to him”—meantime the paddy wagon was standing ready, rear end wide open and then you once again—brave woman!—with a panther leap of a by now considerably stronger and better-looking body landed smack in front of the wagon, a long-legged lightning streak in a short sheepskin jacket, scattering them to both sides (by that time they were already pushing the poor schmuck into the van): “Boys!”—your voice sent sparks through the air like a piece of flint—“What are you trying to do here, huh?!” And you sprang the captive free: the boys (more like mating bulls, really) opened ranks, became somehow softer around the edges and more malleable, stepped back, mumbled something in defense along the lines of “Well, how come he…”—oh yeah, he resisted arrest and said something rude—and then cutie-pie stepped forward and you scooped up the victim and let’s get the hell out of here! (And wouldn’t it be like that on your first night with that man, when he boldly zoomed up the one-way street and the cops pulled him over—and he, puny and stooped in an unbuttoned leather jacket which suddenly drooped on him like a used condom, was explaining something to them out there, flailing his arms about: come on, guys, what did I do, I didn’t, honest—and you, tired of waiting in the car swung the door open, stepped out, click-clicked your heels down the sidewalk, tossed your curls and, absorbing the ravenous glances of the holster-swinging males—one could light a cigarette on your scintillating laugh: “What’s the problem, gentlemen? We didn’t break any rules?”—and the tempest somehow dissipated all at once, well okay then, go ahead, but watch yourselves. And in the early morning, fixing his shining eyes on you as you lay half-draped on the couch, he muttered slowly, smacking his lips and relishing his triumphant smile: “Ah, you’re a tough broad—jumped right out to plow the cops in the kisser… I could go do some jobs with you,” and you were flooded by a surge of childish pride: Finally, finally somebody noticed—because he was one of those who could have come out of the prison camps and you met, after all these years—for he was more than a brother, he was homeland and home…) Fear oozed in from the outside like caustic fumes, but inside the house it was warm, sultry in fact, teenage depression, no, neurasthenia, some kind of stupid pills, fever stuck at 99.2, tears umpteen times a day, the lady doctor told you to undress and asked Daddy to leave the room “she’s a big girl already”—and you were shocked that Daddy, rather than defend his paternal rights—after all, it was his child that was about to be examined!—shuffled to the door in humiliation, flustered and dwarfed as if caught red-handed (the curious thing, she tells herself with the imperturbability of a surgeon, is that he really was a good-looking guy, talkative, witty, and ready to embrace life, and women liked him, and there would have been absolutely no problem finding some action outside the house, so why did he guard his chastity like some Galician old maid, was it not because Mother married him still before he was “rehabilitated” and he spent his whole life cowering, afraid to hear her say aloud what he was secretly tormenting himself with within—that he ruined her life? But to be left alone, without her, he was afraid of that, too, wasn’t he). And by way, this time they only charged him with “willful unemployment,” keeping him for only twenty-four hours in the district jail and sending him out after that only as a night watchman to a construction site where he sat in a glass booth opening gates for dump trucks and the rest of the time reading Bruno Schulz, about whom he was going to someday write a book but never did get around to it (he had pretty good taste in literature, except that he couldn’t stand any hint of eroticism, like the Catholic Index)—his panic at her unrestrained growth—“Hey, stop that!”—settled into his insides and slowly sawed away at them with a dull blade, but they only diagnosed cancer when it was too late to operate, his whole reproductive system was affected: prostate, testes (every day Mother grated carrots for juice and squeezed them by hand, twisting the ball of mash through a piece of cheesecloth, her fingers, which had once strummed a guitar, acquired a permanent yellow color and could be straightened only with effort, and at nights Daddy’s girl would run to the phone booth down the block to call the ambulance, and so when Mother, her eyes white with horror, returned from the hospital one day with news of the diagnosis, which at all costs was to be kept a secret from Daddy, the first thought that flashed through your head [which you would never ever forgive yourself], was a cold and merciless, hissed through clenched teeth: Thank God!). In fact, it was nothing less than war, a war in which there could be no winners because, having exhausted all means to get his way (pin ’em down with your knee, shove ’em into the crib, “she’s just a child,” we wanted a boy, but that’s okay, she turned out a smart tough cookie and she’ll show them all!)—having done all that, the man resorts to the ultimate weapon, death, and that does the trick, you lay down your arms and you go over to his side. And your adolescence, which you swore you would never again relive, it catches up with you twenty years later, releasing from the darkest recesses of your being a tearful and frightened teenage girl who takes over completely, and then it laughs at you long and hard: “What, thought you could get away?… Didn’t get too far, did you?”