Picture 54

Named a Finalist for the 2022 Summer Short Fiction Prize

Content Warning: Racism, Death, Suicide, OCD, and Self Harm

ALEKS WAS A BURDENED MAN OF TWENTY-EIGHT WHO GUARANTEED THE DEATHS OF MANY PEOPLE, not because he held a gun to their heads and pulled the trigger, but because as an illustrator paid to edit photographs, he erased faces, erased lives, from images. Day-in and day-out, he hunched over his drafting table in the art department and did what was asked of him.

They took the body, but he took the image.

One could remove all evidence of a person’s existence until only memory, like a phantom, remained.

PICTURE 1

Man with Hat: charged with treason; death by gunshot at the Kommunarka mass shooting ground.

Work was a ghoulish sort of surgery, the retouching of a photograph: with a scalpel, he made an opening along the edge of an old woman in a white coat, adjacent to the image of a man in an ushanka-styled hat with the pinned earflaps; he glued paper skin over another’s body, one image devouring the other in its entirety; he brushed ink upon the new photo to heal crude edges and soothe cut flesh; and then the man in the hat no longer existed. The real man in the hat had been killed in a cell somewhere else, off page, but here Aleks killed him or at least made him disappear from his gelatin silver print. The postures of the bodies, the facial expressions, they stayed with Aleks because looking at something long enough burned it onto walls of his memory, scratches into stone. Despite how he manipulated the photograph into a new image, all that was removed never truly left his mind.

Outside, people vanished. A neighbor, a friend, a family member, strangers he passed on the way to work. It was beyond him how a government’s machinery could make so many disappear. Everyone could feel what happened. They knew enough to be terrified but never enough to do anything about it.

The part Aleks played in that machinery made him heavy and drawn, but he needed the employment. He put the final touches on the photograph, but peering over his shoulder was the man in the hat whose image Aleks had erased, a phantom of complex personhood straining towards the meaning of his end but unable to find it.

His searching look disturbed Aleks, for the tiny eyes were two mismatched marbles in a burrowed face, consigned to the whims of a capricious government.

His ghost stood watching with the other ghosts, shafts of shadows in a moving, floating grove. They followed Aleks home, stood over his bed as he slept, and were there when he opened his eyes the next morning. Aleks wished he could ignore them.

PICTURE 2

Somber Woman: charged with treason; death by starvation and infirmity in gulag.

Clean hands. Aleks wanted clean hands and used so much of the rough industrial soap that the skin on his knuckles tended to crack. His coworker Kirill talked about dirtiness in the darker features of those who came from the Caucasus and found employment for skilled labor in Moscow.

“Only some men—not all, but some, like Aleks—they come here and think they deserve the same as me. Chernozhopy are a threat to good Soviet men.” Kirill talked like this to others in the office, pretending to whisper. Chernozhopy was a slang word with teeth and seemed to pleasure Kirill when it arrived at Aleks’s desk and bit down. Aleks might have pointed out he had formally joined the Party years before Kirill, but instead he would find himself back at a sink, furiously washing his hands, never quite clean.

He worked with scalpel and glue on a picture of delegates from the 5^th Congress of Soviets in Petrograd. He removed an old woman seated amidst the group. The woman wore a buttoned, dark dress, but most striking was her somber face. Her features were darker, like his, and her expression was as his mother’s, that she kept the world of her mind locked inside her. He remembered how his mother would measure every single word in the presence of his father, but she’d pinch Aleks’s cheek and smile whenever they had a moment of reprieve, and despite all that weighed her down, his mother was a source of buoyancy to his childhood, to his spirit.

His mother had come from Bat’umi, a Georgian city along the coast of the Black Sea, and his mother’s father had been an Ottoman soldier who died when she was young. She moved elsewhere in the Adjara region to marry and raise a family on a farm. She outlived Aleks’s father, who until his death had blocked every push for Aleks to attend university. Once his father passed, from what his mother had called a stone heart, Aleks attended school and started his career in earnest away from the farm. He missed the smell of tangerines from the trees at the back of his ancestral home. Letters from his mother always included a few fragrant leaves from those tangerine trees. The remembered that smell from when she’d smile and squeeze his face.

The letters arrived less frequently, and then they stopped altogether. She died in 1929 during the first push for collectivization. The news pushed him into a drunken stupor, which stretched for 10 days and nearly cost him his life.

At his desk, Aleks polished the newly retouched image and for hours, later, watched in silence as the ghost of the old woman with the somber face walked back and forth in front of a window, sneaking peeks of the outside world before returning to fix her collar or dust off her sleeves.  Like all the ghosts who stayed with him, she was silent and locked in a habit. He kept hoping for a look on her face, something that conveyed the emotion of love or even recognition—which was impossible because she wasn’t his mother. But for hours after she’d followed him home, his mind started to bend. She was his mother, then she was the other woman—back and forth it went, and he exhausted himself, wishing for the smell of tangerine leaves, wishing she wasn’t well and truly gone.

PICTURE 3

Man on the Train: charged with treason; death from blunt impact trauma during interrogation at Lefortovo Prison.

From the start, he had quickly learned to keep himself composed in the presence of his coworkers since no man could be so conspicuous as to see ghosts and then keep his position at work. Order needed to be enforced in his mind and therefore at his workstation. Every item had a home, was nicely weighed and under control. This included his pens, knives, sharpeners, jars of ink, brushes, cleaning instruments, and an aerograph. This last tool was an air-operated instrument artists used to spray dye, and with his current photograph, it helped him extricate the previous artist’s mistakes.

The image featured a propaganda train that ran through the countryside during the October Revolution. Locals would be encouraged to fight for the Red Army with the words painted on the outside of the train carriages and handed out in newspapers at each stop. A scrawny boy hung out of the train window, delivering printed copies of the recent Izvestiia to a sea of reaching hands.

One window over from the boy was a person who had been removed from the image. The man was a silhouette facing the camera and filled with itchy lines. These were the brush strokes of a sloppy hand since the man was still noticeable—distracting even—not well-blended into the back paneling of the train. When an object was removed from an image, the artist must reconstruct additional negative space to smooth the surrounding flesh over what it has lost, to sew invisible stitches and close up the wound.

Aleks fixed the mistakes with careful application of the aerograph, and soon the man on the train was no more. The man instead became a fearsome specter among the other ghosts. He stood as a life-sized version of what he’d been on the page: a silhouette filled with itchy lines facing Aleks. The hairs on Aleks’s arms raised on guard as the ghost stood near and lingered. Aleks could swear he felt the light touch of a breath on his neck.

Aleks met Danila later that afternoon, when the sun made the world look like golden wheat and butter.

Kirill said that Danila was a kohzyr, a big shot, some nobody who’d become one of Stalin’s most eminent political designers and was now here to boss them all around. His posters garnered large print runs, helping boost the regime’s plans. When Danila introduced himself, Aleks accidentally knocked over a cup of pens. His tightly organized workstation loosened into chaos.

“At ease, comrade,” Danila joked. “What is that you’re working on?”

Aleks showed his finished image of the propaganda train and mentioned how he’d been fixing another artist’s work, how once there was a man’s silhouette.

“We play with the reality of a photos, and such work can be unsettling,” Danila said. He smiled, and Aleks saw for the first time a person he might like to know.

PICTURE 4

Mikhail Tomsky: charged with treason; death by gunshot, self-inflicted.

Aleks could smell whenever Danila entered the office: a fresh scent of citrus and honey. He was in awe of Danila’s mastery over brush and pen and vision and wanted to learn all he could from the man only a few years his senior. Whenever Danila visited his workstation to chat or consult on an issue, Aleks bore down on the dancing feeling inside himself. He’d school his face into calm professionalism, but ultimately, his insides were scraps of paper fluttering in a whirlwind. Aleks had trouble understanding this feeling for a man.

“I know him,” Danila said as he pointed at a narrow-faced, besuited individual in the back row of a seated group—they were the new project on Aleks’s desk. “Tomsky. The man was called Tomsky. He was a printer I’d worked with before he became president of the Congress of Trade Unions.”

“He’s a fool,” Aleks said.

“Why do you think so?”

Aleks opened his mouth, but he couldn’t find the right words. He wanted to say Tomsky had drawn fire for condemning collectivization, for condemning Stalin. Tomsky should’ve read the signs. Tomsky should’ve stayed quiet.

“I don’t think he was a fool,” Danila said as he lowered his voice and stepped closer to Aleks. At that, Aleks was both surprised and curious. The man was meant to be a champion of Stalin’s. Perhaps he was testing him?

“When Tomsky saw what was coming his way, he fed himself a bullet,” Aleks said.

“I know.”

“He left a note, begging for his family to be spared. They weren’t.”

“And a fool doesn’t think before he speaks?”

Aleks nodded.

Danila’s voice was barely a whisper. “How was he to know Stalin would remember almost a decade later? Many of our families suffered the famine, suffered collectivization. Can you account for all you did in your grief?”

Aleks spared a glance at the ghost of the old women who so reminded him of his mother. He returned to Danila’s intense stare and didn’t know what to say.

“I know I can’t,” Danila said and left.

Aleks sat, shocked, at his workstation.

Tomsky’s ghost was shaking his head, his face in his hands. Tears leaked between his fingers and ran in unnatural rivulets down his arms. The ghost that looked like Aleks’s mother offered consolation, but Tomsky refused her help, so she returned to walking back and forth in front of the window.

PICTURE 5

Unnamed Official Sitting with Stalin and Shock Workers: charged with treason; death by thermal trauma at Sukhanovka, or Special Facility No.110, formerly a convent.

The ghost this time lay in a tight-fitting body bag, squirming on the floor. That’s how he looked in the photograph, though he had been sitting upright between Stalin and a sign that read Union Conference of Collective Farm Shock Workers.

Shock workers were a foundation for the new culture, the new Russian ideal. They were the people who achieved beyond the measure of their jobs or quotas because the spirit of the working-class was a fire that burned brighter than any precious capitalist notion. They were part of the proof: the vision of communism was worthwhile and the Soviets were an exceptional people.

Another artist before Aleks had tried to remove the man’s likeness simply by panting over the body. The shading and outline of the body—which either came through some ratio of transparency from the covering ink or was added on by the original artist in what Aleks could only imagine was a sick joke—combined into a vision of a corpse wrapped in a funeral shroud, or as the ghost now showed, a body bag. Danila had assigned the photograph to Aleks.

“See if you can remove the man. While you’re at it, reconstruct some semblance of normal around the edges, where holes mark deterioration of the copy—” Danila had paused, seemingly fixated. “Take special care with the holes in the bodies of the background men and women. I don’t want them to look like they’ve just faced a firing squad.”

Aleks had gone to work with a scalpel first to remove the man and realign the people sitting in the foreground, including Stalin. How curious it was that even those honored in positions closest to Stalin still were not safe. With glue and meticulous pen work, he reconstructed the placement of all the people, posed without any sign that the man who’d originally been there was now gone. He shaded in new coat buttons, folded hands, and all else that made sense to fill the new space. Then he moved onto the holes along the edges of the copy to restore the faces and bodies of the background workers. Next, he used his aerograph to improve the contrast. He also feathered the edges and greyed the bottom just slightly to soften the scene. He rephotographed the copy to test the results and see if the work met Danila’s standards.

“Aleks, most excellent work! You had no easy job. Oh—the detailing at the edges, wonderful flourish there.”

He beamed at each of Danila’s compliments. The body-bagged man still squirmed on the floor of the office.

“Let me buy you a drink to show my thanks,” Danila said.

Hours later, Aleks tried to fall asleep, but his mind was abuzz, high on life and possibility beyond his solitary existence, and for the first time, the ghosts did not follow him home.

PICTURE 6

Villagers in Kashino: charges amounting to treason; death by various means.

Aleks stood at the sink, withdrawn in his mind and unaware he’d been cleaning his hands for nearly ten minutes. Words from Kirill had struck him down from whatever height of happiness he’d allowed himself the past weeks. Well-trod paths in his brain—ones learned at an early age—were what helped him retreat and sink into a dynamic where men like Kirill speak and men like Aleks listen. His mind, in a fever, took out the pain on his hands, and there was a strange comfort in the rhythm of repeated scrubbing.

“Aleks!—Aleks, stop,” Danila said when he entered the bathroom. He pulled Aleks’s hands from the faucet and dried them against his shirt. Knuckles split and bled through callouses. Danila wrapped Aleks’s hands in a handkerchief.

Aleks apologized.

“What is the meaning of this?” Danila shook Aleks’s hands to emphasize precisely what he was asking. “I’ve seen you do this before, but when I called out to you moments ago, you couldn’t hear me—No, please don’t apologize again. Just tell me why.”

“I can’t. I don’t know why it hurts.”

“I think if you look at the blood, you’ll puzzle it out.”

“No, I don’t know why Kirill’s words hurt.”

Danila took a moment before he responded. “He’s an oaf and barely does his job on a good day. No one likes him, even his assistants think he’s a tyrant. You shouldn’t care what he says.”

Still, Kirill’s words festered. They took over every part of Aleks’s mind until all that remained was his voice.

“Filthy oshibka,” Kirill had said. “You bugs just take and take and take. Everything you touch turns to rot.”

The power plant outside Moscow, in the village of Kashino, was honored by a visit from Lenin at the tail end of 1920, roughly two years before he was taken out of public life. The original picture had 93 men, women, and children standing with Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. Almost two decades later, an assignment came down calling for the picture’s reproduction. A list of names and a scrap copy of the photo marked with all the people needing removal was what accompanied the film. When Aleks finished, all the adults had been removed, and many of the children as well. The numbers of ghosts in the office grew, many times over, with parents in terrifying agony, accompanied by the tiny, smudged faces of their young with tiny hands fit in tiny gloves and glassy eyes that looked on, empty. Only a handful of children remained in the image. Positioned with Lenin and Krupskaya, they stood against a background of gray ink.

PICTURES 7-52

People from TEN YEARS OF UZBEKISTAN: charges amounting to treason; death by various means.

“They’re dead. So many of them, dead,” said a man named Rodchenko. Danila invited Aleks into his office to meet with them both, and also to divide them off from parties inclined to eavesdrop on matters that might push careers ahead. Danila meant to protect what was said. Rodchenko raised a cigarette to his lips and tried to start his lighter. After several shaky attempts, he gave up.

Aleks didn’t understand the situation until Danila explained. In 1934, the government had charged Rodchenko to make a book commemorating ten years of Soviet rule in the Republic of Uzbekistan. His massive volume was a success in their eyes, equal parts album and embellished statistics. Professional photographs of upper-level bureaucrats, figures of praise for governance and communism, and daring new design choices elevated the book to great commercial acclaim. Except now, Stalin commanded his men to revamp Uzbek leadership, to cleanse and fill it with new people. One wasn’t simply fired in his regime; they were liquidated. A person on the outs would be leveled with varying charges of anti-Soviet activity and then gifted summary execution. Rodchenko’s book had subsequently been banned, and if his personal copy still included the faces of the old leadership—those who’d been deemed traitors and enemies—than he himself would be seen as a traitor and an enemy. The logic that guided this policing was never coherent, as some victims were sent to gulags, or worse, but others were granted leeway in exchange for the fitfully styled gesture, such as the defacement of one’s own book.

Aleks, first, was shocked by Danila’s candor, but Danila possessed the sort of savvy that made Aleks want to remain loyal. This wasn’t a test; this was an invitation into a close-knit circle, something that hit the survival part of Aleks’s brain, so he decided to help. That, and Aleks had been a fan of Rodchenko’s work for quite some time.

Rodchenko was a leading man in the movement of Constructivism, which was new, exciting abstract art of courageous lines, two or three colors, edges and angles so sharp they pierced the mind. He used photomontage to merge and oppose fragments of an image, experimenting with what unified a composition.

Thumbing through Rodchenko’s copy of Ten Years of Uzbekistan, Aleks saw Rodchenko’s signature experimentation in the nooks and crannies a book commissioned by the government would allow. A handful of titles and lesser designs, raised in relief and ornamented from the surface, were curious choices against the opposing, unembossed sections. A few pages were oversized for the reader to unfold for larger, more thrilling perspectives. Courageous layouts of photos, with color-printing in just a few rich dyes with a halftone style, invited visual vocabulary that Aleks would never be able to articulate but still felt, ribboned among the shapes inside his body.

Rodchenko kept rubbing his hands over his bald head, eyes sunken into a round face.

“What does Varvara say?” Danila asked after Rodchenko’s wife, also a celebrated artist.

“This project was as much her baby, as it was mine. I don’t dare repeat her words.” Then, Rodchenko pulled out a sheaf of papers all scribbled with notes. “These are my instructions. If I do it alone, I’ll drink myself to death. The time I spent interviewing these people, getting to know them. And the constant, gnawing question I find myself asking is, does it matter whether I remove them or not? Won’t I be next?”

After a duration of time where the three men sat in silence, Danila had an answer: “The book does not speak for itself, of what it has; it will tell of others, of those it has lost. The defacing will conjure the message of tragedy, and the photographs, after rounds and rounds of our heavy hands, will inaugurate a sort of echo in the world. Our memories will not be owned. Your efforts here, now, do matter, and we will help keep you among the ranks of the living a little while longer.”

Aleks, who had been reviewing Rodchenko’s notes and remained mostly silent up until this point, finally spoke. “I’ll get the supplies.”

And so, for hours they worked, through the night and well into the morning. Heavy India ink blocked out the images and names of bureaucrats, men and women who’d been met with applause one month and then tortured and executed the next. Bottles of drink and jars of ink kept the pages turning. Undried ink smeared and glued between the pages by accident, not that the men cared.

One by one, members of the late Uzbek leadership populated in Aleks’s crowd of ghosts, their faces confused and their mouths opening and shutting—silent rants and pleas. For a moment, Aleks thought, Rodchenko looked at the ghosts like he, too, could see them, but the moment passed, and Aleks convinced himself he was mistaken.

PICTURE 53

Campaigners of Vigilance: charges amounting to treason; death by various means.

“I fear we are being poisoned,” Danila said one morning. He brought Aleks a mug of coffee, the fresh citrus scent of his presence prominent as usual.

“Poisoned?” Aleks looked at the coffee and then back at Danila. “With what?”

“With our own dread.”

Confused, Aleks asked Danila to explain.

“I worry of what I will lose, but every morning I am consoled. Every morning you walk into the office and sit at your desk, and I can see you’re still alive.”

Aleks recognized the Lubyanka building in the photograph; it was a few blocks down from where he worked. The place was a processing station for prisoners destined for the gulags, though many died before they left Lubyanka. This photo contained a workforce more than two-hundred strong, posed as a group, solemn but proud of their efforts to purge the Party of the enemy. Aleks did not want to see their ghosts, now that more than five years after the photo was taken, he was tasked to remove two-thirds from this group of murderers. But was he not also a murderer? Perhaps, he realized, with Danila’s help, his opinion of the work had changed. What he was doing as an artist and retoucher wasn’t cruel killing, not in the way these people, seated comfortably in Lubyanka’s yard, had falsified the guilt of others and had become an expeditious organ of terror.

Something unsettling lurked behind Kirill’s normal bullying, and for too long it had been ignored. His jealousy, and the perils it brought to pass for Danila, had come in multiple phases. The first was a cloying appreciation for Danila’s past successes. The second was an open, loud tactic of conversation that led with passive, sneaky statements, alleging Danila sympathized with the French and British back when he toured western cities, early in his career. The third phase was outright vilification and calls for investigation.

Kirill spoke to a severely uniformed man and nodded in the direction of Danila. “…the one whose hand is on the shoulder of that Chernozhopy.”

Aleks shrugged his shoulder away from Danila.

On the man’s uniform was an oval badge, three or so inches in length. Its design included a gold-painted sickle and hammer against a vertical pewter dagger. A red banner framed the letters at the bottom in a manner that, to Aleks, resembled flames. The letters spelled NKVD.

Later, Danila told Aleks, “Yes, I know what those letters mean.”

PICTURE 54

Danila Volkov: charged with treason; death by suffocation during transport to Butovo Shooting Range, in a truck labelled “BREAD”.

The day Aleks finally learned Danila had vanished, he walked the hallways and stairs, searched each room and floor of the building. He ran and rechecked, returning to the places he knew he’d already cleared but hoped he’d missed something. Then, Kirill set up his work in Danila’s office, which no longer held Danila’s belongings.

“Get that stupid expression off your face,” Kirill said through a hungry grin.

No one talked about Danila’s disappearance, but to Aleks, what went unspoken, what had been veiled and inferred and soon forgotten, made him want to roar.

The picture came to his desk years later. He unfolded the paper, but a rush of blood made him drop it. A group of designers, and he was there, younger, a face lit up, blessed with charm and self-possession.

He saved the cutout after he completed the assignment. He stored it inside a hollowed bed post in his apartment. Some nights, he would take it out to remind himself. Other nights, he just sat at the table near his bed, and under the light of the lamp stood the ghost of Danila, hunched and staring back at him.