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Page 19.

— iv —

That shadow of all shadows, jaguar in the night, Uncle Viktor, he told me—when he let me find him many years later in Moscow after the Cold War, where I brought him coffee and cigarettes and raspberry jam from the West—he told me that the universe is an infinite and eternal circle.

“Everything ends as it begins, and in the end is its beginning,” Viktor told me over Russian vodka, American cigarettes, and Finnish marmalade in his miserable cold-water flat, while the lights were out over Chertanovo’s brooding high rise tenements.

In my later years I have become a woman of introspection rather than action. Uncle Viktor had many well-worn books in his flat, among them the love story of Yuri Zhivago and Larissa Guishar—the beautiful, immortal, yet tragic Lara. Many of these were controversial and forbidden books in Stalin’s morbid universe. But Uncle Viktor was widely read, having traveled and lived in the supposedly corrupt and decaying West so many years.

Strange how the most corrupt and venal of people will tell their people that up is down, down is up, evil is wonderful, and good is to be avoided, all in the name of phony patriotism and phony moralities. Uncle Viktor figured it out for himself, in London and New York and San Francisco, decades before any of his baffled and brainwashed contemporaries cracked the code of lies. What a pack of nonsense the nomenklatura wrote in the papers and spouted in the media to keep people stupid and enslaved. They must have laughed, driving around in fine cars, with their hard currency, and Western goods hidden in the trunk, while hard-working common people suffered and lived lives of abject illogic—willingly, if that is possible, since they knew nothing better.

Stalin murdered and betrayed many persons—and just as many would take their revenge on him if they could. If anyone betrayed Stalin, it was his favorite spy, Viktor Mutsev. Then again, Stalin nearly had Uncle Viktor rubbed out in his rage that Viktor did not bring him my father’s head on a silver table service. In the end, for my mother’s sake, Uncle Viktor and the American CIA conspired to hide my father and his two surviving women somewhere, deep in the heart of America. All of this is part of my story. I finally understood why he never came for us. It was a relief to know that he never knew. He was a quiet, easy going man of profound courage—he would have split the sea to come for us if only he had known the truth a lot earlier.

As the long Muscovite evening wore on, in early spring 1992, Uncle Viktor (Colonel Mutsev) and I sat at his plain wooden table. We heard icy cold wind and hard rain drops rattling the windows, listened to traffic noise and distant train horns, and hoped his granddaughter Marinka would come home alive yet once more from some punkish drug rage near Arbat.

In the tedious way of old men, Viktor found his eyeglasses and hovered in the dark (the electricity was out again) searching on the wall amid his books. Pedantically, he forced me to be patient, though I trembled with impatience, while he took down a well-worn volume of T. S. Eliot. He opened it as we sat with an oil lantern on the table at our elbows. He pointed a Destroyer’s clay-colored life-and-death finger (reminding me of the Creator in the Sistine Chapel ceiling) to the opening page of Four Quartets, beginning at the beginning of Burnt Norton:

From T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets

I was already becoming an amateur philosophe, as my beloved Grandmère said a woman must become once the last blush is off the bloomed rose, and she passes the pivotal age of 45. I came to Viktor’s shabby apartment during that 1992 evening in the last shimmering bloom of my life as a tabloid gladiatrix sung by paparazzi. I left there later that evening, bound for Sheremetyevo, in the wilting and folding gauze of my developing new aura as a woman of reflection…and of tranquility, thank heaven, which deepened as the last crashing chords of a great symphony rumbled through a rapt theater, and Stalin’s poisoned arrow at last fell into indifferent soil.