I forced myself to lift my eyes off the picture, and they fell upon another striking image hanging on the wall directly in front of me. It was a framed poster depicting two exhausted prisoners in gray uniforms wearing a yoke made out of an enormous block of lumber. One held a hammer in his hand, the other a sickle. A uniformed guard brandished a gun behind them, the Cyrillic version of USSR splattered on the concrete floor beneath their feet. The caption read This Was Soviet Freedom!
The poster reminded me of the ordeal my godfather had doubtlessly suffered to escape the Nazis and the Soviets and start a new life in America. I didn’t know the details, but I was sure his early life had been harrowing, and now it appeared his end had been the same. He deserved better.
Roxy’s voice carried from the kitchen. “You find anything in there?”
“No,” I said, and began opening the drawers to his desk.
“I told you there was nothing there. You almost done? I’m going to call home and tell my kids I’m on the way.”
“Yup.”
The drawers contained the usual office supplies, a slide rule and a calculator, a flashlight and three vintage copies of Playboy that appeared to have been perused three or four million times each. My godfather didn’t have a computer, which didn’t surprise me. My mother didn’t have one either, and many of the older generation wanted no part of the latest technology. What did surprise me was the complete absence of business records of any kind. I was about to ask Roxy if she knew who kept his books when I noticed a small pad of paper was elevated an inch off the desk.
I lifted the pad and found a small notebook bound with burgundy leather. The first few pages contained phone numbers. I scanned the names. They featured the requisite servicers any homeowner would need, such as plumber, electrician, and duct cleaner. Duct cleaner? The others were either friends or business associates, I guessed. Some of the names were in English, but most were in Ukrainian. I recognized some of the latter.
I heard the toilet flush so I stood up to leave. The rest of the notebook turned out to be a calendar. Various appointments appeared on the pages, most of them self-explanatory. Out of sheer logic, I turned to the date he’d died. While all the other entries in the calendar had been written in a normal font size, this one had been scrawled in blue ink with enormous letters that took up the entire page.
The entry consisted of two letters: “DP.” The “P” had a little curl at the top. It was impossible to tell which language my godfather had been using because the letters were written in cursive. In printed form, the English letter “D” corresponds to the Ukrainian “Д.” But in cursive form, the “D” looked the same in both languages. The letter “P” was the Ukrainian version of an “R.” Hence, if the note was in English, it was DP. If it was written in Ukrainian, it was DR.
People maintained calendars to keep track of meetings, which consisted of people and places. Hence, DP was most likely a person or a place. I skimmed through the calendar. Appointments pertaining to the Ukrainian community were noted in Ukrainian, details pertaining to those outside the community were written in English. They appeared evenly split with an average of one or two per week. Each entry contained a person’s name, and some contained a reference to a place, as well.
An eye doctor’s appointment was noted in English with the address and phone number beside it. As with other appointments in English, the doctor’s name and location were spelled out in English. In cases where the entry had been written in Ukrainian, he wrote the destinations out in longhand—“National Home, Credit Union, Church Hall”—but abbreviated the names of the people with their initials. There were sufficient Ukrainian entries containing Cyrillic letters for me to deduce that he used initials when he had appointments with Ukrainains: “lunch with БШ,” “bingo with ЮТ,” “fix gutter for ЄЖ.” That meant the letters DP were probably someone’s Ukrainian initials, which corresponded to DR in English.
The rest of the notebook provided no insight into his business. In fact, the calendar appeared to consist of his personal appointments, as though he kept his professional ones somewhere else, if not entirely in his mind.
I heard Roxy’s footsteps and slipped the notebook into my bag. I’m not one hundred percent sure why I didn’t want to share my discovery with her. Perhaps I wanted to trust her, but couldn’t afford to put my faith in anyone for the time being.
“You find anything?” she said.
“Nope,” I said, brushing aside my pangs of guilt. “Do you know who did your uncle’s books?”
“Some Uke accountant. I’ll get you the name.”
We walked outside. I shined the light and Roxy closed the door. As I drove away, I noticed that one of the Hondas was still there but the other one was gone. The ignition wasn’t on, however, and there didn’t appear to be anyone inside.
Roxy tried to talk me into staying the night with her but I refused. I told her I was going straight to a motel but it was a lie. I knew only one man in the Ukrainian community with the Ukrainian initials DP. His name was Danilo Rus and I’d been in his home before.
He was my former father-in-law.
He was Roxy’s father.
CHAPTER 13
The house smelled of mothballs and echoed with the sound of a tragic Ukrainian ballad, a powerful soprano wailing with unrelenting misery about her son’s death in an ancient war with the Tatars. Darwin’s law had prevailed after centuries of battles for the breadbasket of Europe: no one could cry like a Uke. We were the world heavyweight champions of mourning.
When I knocked, my former father-in-law opened the door and stood there mute, glaring at me, cane in hand. I refused to go away, so he moved aside to let me in. He stayed mum and kept his eyes on me as I passed him.
A solitary Tiffany desk lamp with an amber stained glass shade provided barely enough light in the living room to conduct a séance. A portrait of a baby-faced JFK hung on the center of the main wall, draped in black velvet. A framed picture of a battle-worn JFK rested on a dusty old piano, with the proclamation of a day of mourning from the Connecticut Legislature framed beside it. Both pictures looked as though they hadn’t been touched for fifty years. The piano contained a collection of family photos. Conspicuous in its absence was any sign of me in any of the pictures. Also conspicuous was the second swath of black velvet resting atop a picture of Rus’s son — my former husband. The photo showed him at his most professorial and dapper, speaking from a lectern with passion etched in his face. It had been taken the day he’d died fifteen months ago.
Parkinson’s had gripped Rus since I’d last seen him. His tottering and twitching would have elicited nothing but empathy had he been someone else. But he wasn’t someone else. He was the father-in-law who’d advised his son not to marry an unremarkable-looking girl who wasn’t interested in homemaking. That only idiots and men who’d impregnated their girlfriends compromised at the altar.
We spoke Ukrainian. First-generation kids with any sliver of language skills spoke Ukrainian with their elders. It was better to mix in an English word when one’s vocabulary fell short than to avoid Ukrainian altogether. The latter was an exercise in humiliation and embarrassment, and an admission that one had drifted so far from home that she couldn’t remember the language of her youth.
“I thought we’d had our final words at his funeral,” he said, after turning down the stereo. “When I told you I never wanted to see you again for the rest of my life. Why are you here? Why are you tempting me?”