You Must Go and Win: Essays Read Online Free Page B

them?”
    “I’d better. One of them was just a drunk, but the other was a man with a past—a former chauffeur in the KGB. He used to drive agents to make their arrests. Sometimes big shots. These kinds of visits … well, a lot of people were never heard from again. Anyway, they’d come by on their rounds and we’d pool our money, go drinking.”
    “What would you say to them?” I’d asked. “I mean the animals.”
    “I don’t know. I just … commiserated.”
    By the time Papa began working at the zoo, he’d been on the blacklist for years. The Ministry of Higher Education had long ago eliminated the graduate position he’d received in physics, a signal that he’d never be allowed to pursue his PhD. He had also quit the Komsomol, a dangerous move for anyone save those who had already given up all hope of a career in the Soviet Union. As the last light faded, I imagined my father there, a young man in a uniform with a gun, staring through the bars, seeking out dark, wet eyes for a few quiet moments of communion. Before the KGB chauffeur came to take him away.
     
     
    We went back to Volodya’s place for dinner—a three-bedroom apartment extravagant by Soviet standards, but which could now merely be considered cozy—to drink vodka and enjoy a lavish feast of mayonnaise-based salads. By the time Volodya and Inna led us back to the hotel it was well past midnight and the windows
of the concrete boxes surrounding Freedom Square were lit up like giant grids in an epic game of Battleship.
    “I have a present for your father that I’ve been waiting to give to you,” Volodya said. Then he reached into his bag and handed me a book. One Hundred Famous Kharkovchiani , it read. Now here was something approximately zero people in my family would have any interest in reading.
    “Thanks,” I said, but Volodya stopped me before I could put it away.
    “First turn to page eighty-four.”
    I opened the book, and Josh came to look over my shoulder. There, to my amazement, was a grainy black-and-white photograph of Papa and an entry that began:

    VILENKIN ALEKSANDR VLADIMIROVICH
(Born 1900–Died 1900)

    I looked up at Volodya, whose smile only grew wider as he noted my wonder and confusion.
    “The text, of course, is not without some errors.”
     
     
    In late September, I received another note from Kiril: “Hello, Alina it is a journalist of Kiril from Kharkov. Thank you very much for an interview. I wrote about Your desire to come forward in Ukraine and, hope, my words will notice. Here that turned out from our correspondence. In my person in Ukraine another admirer appeared for you.”At the bottom of the message, there was a link leading to the Komsomolskaya Pravda website. When I clicked on it I found an old photograph of myself in our backyard in North Carolina hovering above Kiril’s byline. The article began: Our countrywoman, daughter of the famous
physicist Alexander Vilenkin, tells “Komsomol” about how she became a rock star in the United States.
    It was an absurd exaggeration. I had released two albums on obscure indie labels and would have been surprised to learn that sales of either had reached into the high three digits. But it only got worse. Whereas Kiril hadn’t known who my father was when he’d first contacted me, it was clear he’d done some research since then. Now the article was mostly about Papa. And he sounded like a dissident freedom fighter.
    I read on, with growing horror, as weird conjectures flew around like zoons. Despite the famous father , the article continued, Alina has always opened all the doors of life herself. She has never positioned herself as the daughter of the famous scientist, and even appears on stage under the pseudonym Simone. What was stranger, I wondered, the idea that I would create a pseudonym to outrun undeserved glory should anyone discover my association with the creator of the Theory of Eternal Inflation, or the fact that Kiril, during the course of his