When your father dies of AIDS, it’s not like he’s died of heart failure or a stroke. The word “AIDS” alone brings on a vague sense of shame. I saw my father a year before he died: his face was partly paralysed, and he dragged one leg behind him when he walked. In the picture on his renewed commercial driver’s license, he looked like a withered old man: his yellowish eyes, the colour of river silt, were dull, or maybe they reflected the flash of the camera. To conceal his cause of death, his girlfriend, Ilona, put aside all his cheating and took charge of his documents and the funeral. She hid all documentation of his HIV status. I arrived in Astrakhan in a state of confusion – my father had called me from the hospital three days before his death and bragged that he’d trained the nurses to wipe down the windowsills thrice a day. He thought they were lazy, and in his own words, claimed to have “run them through the drills”.

Two weeks before he died, he’d been hospitalised with a severe headache. He was driving empty from Astrakhan to Volgograd, and one morning he felt that something was not right with his head and took some paracetamol. But halfway through the drive, the pain became so intense that he barely made it to the nearest motel, from where he called his friend Fyodor. Luckily, Fyodor was in Astrakhan; he called in some other guys, and they came to get my father in someone’s car. They put him in the back seat and drove him back to Astrakhan. They returned for his truck the following day. In the hospital, pumped full of painkillers, my father quickly felt like himself again, and couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let him go home. But he was most outraged by the state of the room where he’d been put; he was in the most neglected wing of the infectious diseases ward, with other HIV-positive men, and every day he saw these men, one by one, taken out in black body bags.

The first intensification of his illness had come a year before he died, but, naturally, he paid it no attention. Knowing my father, I can say with certainty that he wasn’t registered anywhere, certainly not with the regional AIDS centre. He was aware of his status and thought of it as something fatal. HIV seemed to my father to be a common illness that was somehow supposed to kill him. But he didn’t know when this would happen, and so all his days became a cycle of recurring deathbed moments. At some point, the cycle would end, and he accepted this fact with resentment and sorrow.

I discovered by accident that he had died of AIDS. Talking to Ilona, I implied that I was determined to find out what had killed him. Meningitis, I knew, was treatable. It was very strange for a grown man to have died of that. Ilona went pale, and, taking me by the sleeve, pulled me into their bedroom, where in a rapid-fire whisper she told me what had happened. She looked directly at me and barely blinked. The light in the room was dark blue, like night in the steppe. Ilona’s eyes seemed iridescent in that light. She was afraid. She was afraid of ignorant gossip, afraid that she would die. And she was unbearably ashamed. The vulnerability I saw that night was that of a woman who had done nothing wrong but didn’t realise it. I listened to her without interrupting, but it was difficult to be with her. From hysterical whispering, she switched to obsequious babbling. Begging for forgiveness, she told me that she’d fed my father well and given him his vitamins. “Remember,” she said to me, “I was always telling him to take his vitamins.” “I do remember that,” I said, hoping to calm her; I didn’t want to feel that she was somehow guilty. Because she wasn’t guilty of anything. She’d given my father vitamins, but vitamins weren’t going to help. My father led a destructive way of life: he was always on the road, hardly slept, smoked two packs a day, and once every two weeks drank himself unconscious. A few times, I’d seen him smoking weed in the breaks between routes, or during a long session of loading cargo.

I asked Ilona to leave and remained alone in the blue room, not turning on the light. Sitting down on the side of the large bed, bought at some point in the past by my father, I remembered how, during a two-week break between routes, some truckers had brought him home. He hadn’t passed out, but he wasn’t conscious, either; he was in a state Ilona called ‘the mumbles’. Four men carried him up the stairs to the sixth floor, and behind his body trailed a dotted line of thick droplets of blood. According to the guys, he had stood up to go to his truck and immediately fell facedown onto a concrete curb. Inside the apartment, they put him on the sofa. His face and clothes were drenched in blood. The smell of alcohol filled the room: Ilona rushed over with a half-litre bottle of disinfectant, spreading her arms and scowling, and ordered everyone to get away from him. All four men backed up and left the apartment without saying goodbye.

We were on our own, and I wanted to help Ilona, but she waved me away sharply and ordered me not to touch my father. Back then, I had taken her behaviour for a show of care, but now I understood that she was afraid the blood from his open wound could get on me and the men. She soaked a piece of gauze in disinfectant and put it to my father’s mangled nose. He howled with pain, like a wild animal caught in a snare. He writhed on the sofa, while Ilona, grasping his shoulders, pressed him into the pillow and refused to let him rise. When he passed out, she soaked more gauze in alcohol, wiped the blood from the floor and blotted the stains on the rug. Having finished, she sighed with relief and tossed the gauze into the trash. All this time, I’d been sitting on the step that divided the balcony from the room, watching my roaring drunk father thrash on the colourful fringed bedspread. The room had become narrow and close with the smells of alcohol and fresh blood, and the cloudy aroma of mallow flowers mixed with the smells of fuel oil and male sweat. The lamp’s warm light fell on Ilona’s brown skin. I felt shame and unbearable pity for all of us, that we had wound up here. There was no power that could reverse what was happening. There was no instrument to slice away a section of time and space and, wrapping them in a piece of paper, toss them out, the farther the better, someplace over the fence.

I found out about his death early in the morning. Two weeks before, I’d made a fake dorm pass for my lover, Veronika. Just before the doors closed for the night, she’d show it to the guard and come up to see me on the fourth floor. We slept on my narrow bed, without pillows, beneath a thin sheet. I believed then that living ascetically could help me understand the way the world worked, and could help with my anxiety attacks. But nothing happened the way I intended. At night, after a day of strict fasting, I would binge eat and get drunk on cheap champagne and beer, then find myself unable to sleep because I was so uncomfortable and cold. Veronika slept at the edge of the bed, rolling up her jacket beneath her cheek. When she was asleep, I looked at her head, which she, like my other girlfriends, had shaved bald. I liked her eyes and her thick eyelids, fringed with dark lashes. Her lips folded into a pouty cupid’s bow. In the September morning light, everything looked large, clearly contoured, bright. Even the hideousness of my dorm room, with its standard-issue vinyl wallpaper and brown linoleum, looked purposeful. I didn’t want to get up. As always, I had slept through the lectures on economics and the theory of literary criticism, but I could still make it to art history, which I tried never to miss. I climbed over sleeping Veronika, who smelled like a light hangover and earthy sweat, and went to the fridge, on top of which lay my white Nokia. I saw seven missed calls from Ilona and three from my mother. The calls had begun at 5:30 AM, which meant they’d been trying to reach me for five hours. In the Incoming Calls list, I selected my mother and pressed ‘Dial’. She picked up right away, and with some difficulty, as though she were speaking to me from the bottom of a deep well, said that last night my father had died. I was silent; she asked me what I was going to do. I would get on the train today and go to the funeral. I asked her whether she would go, and she remained silent for a moment, then said she hadn’t made up her mind.

I bought a ticket for the evening train. Veronika came to see me off, but she didn’t know what she was supposed to do in this situation and kept smiling awkwardly. I didn’t know how I was supposed to behave, either. My father had died young; he was only 47. Three days earlier, he’d been shouting at me on the phone that he’d really give the staff at that ward something to remember him by. Now he was in a black bag in a section of the hospital refrigerator. When he was moved from intensive care to the infectious diseases ward, he was appalled at its shabbiness and the disregard for the people there: yellowed plaster hung down from the ceiling in wide strips, and mattresses lay mouldering in their frames, their stuffing clumped. He took a short video on his Samsung of the conditions in which sick people were kept. For the entire 30 seconds of the video, shot with a shaky hand, of the yellow ward with its rotting walls and exposed beams, you can hear his furious cursing. He called Ilona and demanded that she post the video online so that everyone could see how patients at the city hospital were treated. I found his insistence touching; it was predicated on an understanding of the internet as one large, Soviet-era community bulletin board.

He didn’t understand that his video, like many others that wind up online, would sink to the bottom of the internet, where no one would see it. He spoke scathingly of the on-duty nurses. He understood that the misery he had encountered was systemic in nature, but he couldn’t help taking out his rage on the junior medical staff. I tried to stick up for the nurses, but this made him even angrier, and he started blaming everything on me. I listened wordlessly as he cursed, and when he was finished, I quietly pronounced: “Go fuck yourself then.”

After his funeral, I went to Crimea to see my mother. Late September was stormy, and the peninsula had lost its colour. Summer had singed the green from the grass, and in the cold wind, the water had a leaden hue. Everything was grey or beige, like a homely day of mourning. My great aunt Masha, Minnegel-apa, sat in her armchair monitoring the evening news. She was particularly concerned with the weather forecast, because the last storm had killed several people – a great wave had swept them from the pier and pulled them into the open sea. My great aunt mourned for them; she pitied the people who’d died such a pointless death. All they’d wanted was to take a picture of the sea, and it had devoured them. With her glasses on, listening to the local news channel, Aunt Masha kept repeating one thing – their deaths had been so unfair. And then, remembering the reason we were gathered in her house, she would turn and look for a long time at my face. Noticing, I responded with a questioning gesture. And Masha, grumbling something to herself, would say to me that I had to take care of my father’s posthumous business and then, when the time came, return to Astrakhan to find out why he’d died so young. I nodded obediently. I already knew why he had died, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that.

My mother sat in another armchair, also watching television. Seated next to each other, the two of them looked like Tatar nesting dolls, both with matte brown eyes like wet chestnuts, upturned pointed noses and sizeable square jaws. They sat beneath a portrait gallery of Minnegel-apa’s siblings. The photographs on the right were of dark-eyed, red-haired men and women; to the left hung the grey-eyed blonds. After the birth of Grandpa Rafik and the death of Minnegel and Rafik’s mother, their father, Mirdjan, married a Russian woman. Minnegel kept her eyes on the screen, running her sturdy dark fingers through the fringe of the armchair cover. She never talked about her faith, though she often said that Mirdjan had been a well-respected man in Chistopol; he knew the Quran by heart and recited beautifully. The kids were forbidden to stay in the house when neighbours came to see him asking him to slaughter a lamb or circumcise a boy, but as a child, Minnegel would hide beneath the window and listen to her father’s voice. Now she sat there in a turban fashioned out of white cotton fabric, which is what she always wore at home. She never showed her hair, and I had seen it down only once, by accident, one night when she walked into the room where I was sleeping to shut the windows thrown open by a gust of wind. Dyed light brown, her hair reached to her heels. During the day, she plaited it into a few thin braids, relying on bobby pins and clips to twist the braids into a voluminous nest.

Minnegel had never had children; Soviet oncologists had removed her ovaries and uterus. She was the eldest daughter, who’d grown up raising her younger brother, my grandfather Rafik – she spent the rest of her life caring for Rafik as though he were a chronically ill child. And he was that, a sick child: he had been an alcoholic since his youth and suffered from bouts of groundless rage. He beat his first wife, my grandmother Valentina, nearly to death, and later also beat his second wife, another Valentina. Whenever the women pulled themselves together and threw him out of the house, he went back to his sister. She took him in as an orphan. Their mother had died of pneumonia during the war, before Rafik was one, so nine-year-old Minnegel had become his mother. It was a close, stifling relationship in which she went along with his every whim, and at the same time judged him harshly for it. Her love for him was born of pity, and he remained a silly little boy far into his old age. But he really was a mean man. I met Rafik for the first time a few years before my father’s death: his alcohol-ravaged face still held the traces of handsome, masculine Tatar features. He lived in a banya across the road from Minnegel’s house, and when he was sober, he fed the hens and chopped wood. Drunk, he would vomit into a basin that stood by his tapchan; his ulcers, and later his stomach cancer, made untroubled drinking impossible, but he still got drunk every chance he could.

When I sat down next to my mother and Minnegel-apa, it was easy to see the Tatar blood washing out of us, generation after generation. Although it retains some Tatar features, my face looks entirely Russified. On my mother’s birth certificate, Rafik Mirdjanovich Muzafarov is registered as Tatar, while my grandmother, Valentina Ivanovna Zobnina, appears as Russian, and my grandfather registered their daughter, Angella Rafikovna Muzafarova, as Russian, too. So we were Russian, and it was easier for everyone to call Rafik ‘Roman’, while Minnegel became ‘Masha’. It was Rafik who’d decided to name my mother Angella, after the Black lesbian feminist activist Angela Davis. My father had been named Yuriy after Yuriy Gagarin. My father used to make fun of my mother; he understood her Tatar heritage as a kind of congenital flaw, an accident of fate. My mother disliked her Tatar features, but with the years her face became sharper and flattened out broad and square, like Minnegel’s.

My mother first visited Minnegel 20 years after Grandfather Rafik came to Crimea. In 1989, Grandma Valentina finally plucked up the courage to declare that my mother had to choose which of her parents she wanted at her wedding. My mother asked my grandfather, Rafik, not to come. He bought tickets and went to his sister’s. Rafik was emotionally unreachable and almost always drunk. On her first Crimean visit, my mother brought him a gift: a short-sleeved shirt and some thermal underwear. He wore these until he died – not out of sentimentality, I thought, but just out of regular male pragmatism: the shirt and thermals were there to be worn, not much else to it. My mother and grandfather didn’t know how to talk to each other; my mother kept cracking little jokes at his expense, while he grew helplessly, childishly furious at her insolence. I didn’t have much to say to my grandfather, either: when he saw me for the first time, he seized me tightly with bony fingers and started making odd complaints about my height, saying I was somehow a little too healthy. I wasn’t even particularly large; he was just a short, sinewy old man, surprised and bothered by my youth and strength. Letting go of me, he sat down on the sofa, and I sat next to him. Grandfather Rafik turned his expressionless face to me for a moment, but almost immediately looked away again and stared at the television. We sat there for five minutes or so, until he got up anxiously, telling me to straighten the sofa cover, took a plate of freshly baked piroshki from the kitchen, and left the house.

I remained a bit afraid of him, and preferred talking to Minnegel’s husband, my great-uncle Vitya, a kindly agronomist who, until the final days of the Soviet Union, had managed grape and tobacco farms in the Crimean south. When Uncle Vitya learnt that I was studying at the Gorky Literary Institute, he developed a great deal of respect for me. For him, someone who wrote could only be an “honest correspondent”. He proudly told me the story of a young journalist who had come to one of his farms to interview him, proceeded to get drunk on the local Kagor wine, and accidentally went to Sevastopol instead of Simferopol, then published his piece in a Moscow newspaper and sent Uncle Vitya a clipping of it by mail. I tried to explain that I wasn’t studying journalism, but Uncle Vitya couldn’t hear me, because he was practically deaf. He spent his days seated on a stool, holding the sides of a large television topped with a snow-white doily, watching soccer matches and the news with one ear held against the speaker. At dinner, he’d raise his glass of fruit liqueur, turn to me, and ask: “What do you say, correspondent, shall we?”

When Vitya and Minnegel were assigned to work in Crimea in the 1970s, the administration of Yalta gave them a small apartment in the mountains, with a plot of rocky mountain land for a garden. Minnegel used it to grow sweet green figs and strawberries. Once, when I was visiting, she handed me a plastic bucket and told me to take it to Uncle Vitya in the orchard. He’d gone to pick berries and had forgotten to take the bucket along. I went down a steep staircase carved into the rock and squeezed through a gap in the hedge. Uncle Vitya was sitting on the slope in his ancient faded white Panama hat, and looking out over the tree line in the direction where, beyond the hills, the sea began. There was no way for him to hear me. He sat in the deep silence of his deafness, thinking something to himself. The scene made me sad – I couldn’t imagine what might occupy the mind of this quiet, jovial old man. I could hear the chirring of crickets as the waves of their songs rose above the tangled grass, one after another. The sky was a piercing blue. The fierce southern light dazzled my eyes. I came closer to Uncle Vitya and heard that he was singing quietly – a feeble, sad little tune. He was sunk in melancholy, looking out over the trees.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to do: I couldn’t leave the bucket and go back to the house, because then he’d know that I had been watching him, interrupting his singing; on the other hand, it would be a rude intrusion on my part. I sat down some distance away from him to wait for the end of his solitary meditation. Sitting there, I thought that all of old age must be like this lonely gaze into the distance; a gaze toward something unreachable. A solitary disappointment and an internal audit, and a nostalgia for the world you’ll soon be obliged to leave. An unbearable longing for the future and impotent rage at a world that will remain the same, even without you in it. We sat on the stony slope, and I watched as he swayed his head and ran his right hand over the dry grass by his hip. He was alone here, and the wild, restless world capered around him. Uncle Vitya fascinated me, and I began to feel that I wasn’t watching him from a short distance away, but in some other context, like, maybe, in a movie.

Then I wasn’t thinking about him at all, but looking over the treetops myself, imagining the world as a vast place filled with life, when he abruptly turned around. I started in surprise and managed an embarrassed smile; remembering his poor eyesight, I raised my arm in a friendly wave. Uncle Vitya was looking at me with anger. I motioned toward the bucket, and he gave a restrained nod. I stood, pointing toward the bucket once more, and backed up toward the hedge. He nodded in acknowledgement and turned away. Climbing hurriedly through a gap in the growth, I scraped my legs, and the thin, pink scratches began immediately to burn. I was unsettled by the dark look he had given me. Did he know that I’d intruded on his solitude, ruined his moment of sublime sorrow? Or had he been thinking about something he truly hated? The old sorcerer on the mountainside frightened me, and at supper that evening I tried not to look in his direction.

On my final visit, I was just passing through, spending only a few days at their house. All of them were still alive then. Preparing to depart, I sat down on the warm wooden porch to lace up my sneakers and heard Uncle Vitya moving slowly, leaning on his cane, as he left the house. He wasn’t going out to the orchard anymore by then; his legs were getting weaker. He only came into the yard to wipe down his yellow Zaporozhets and rest for a while on the bench beneath the old chestnut tree. It was difficult for Uncle Vitya to walk, and out of respect for his effort, I stopped rushing. He came out and settled on the bench next to me with a loud groan. I shifted to give him more space and turned to face him, smiling. He was staring at me very closely, though his gaze seemed to be directed at something far away. He looked at me with his ancient eyes, blinking slowly. Uncle Vitya reminded me of a giant koala. I wasn’t going to hurry him along, but I also wasn’t sure why he had come out to sit with me. Five minutes earlier, I’d gone into his bedroom and stood in a spot where he could see me, pointing at my backpack. He took one look and turned away, waving me off. Now he’d caught up with me and sat breathing loudly, so I couldn’t bring myself to get up – I felt that he’d come out to see me for some particular reason, that there was something he wanted to say to me. We both sat looking ahead, and after some time had gone by, he began to speak, but his voice lacked the merriment with which he’d toasted his honest correspondent; neither did it have the intensity of his laments about the wasted tobacco fields. All the surface layers of his intonation were gone, and I was listening to a calm, measured old man. He told me that I was a rare type of woman. “I haven’t seen many others like you,” he said. “You’re a wandering woman; there’s no peace anywhere for a woman like you. You always have to be going somewhere, running from something. All most women want is to make a home, but you need something else; you’re homeless, and you see this homelessness not as a lack, but as the only way to live. You’re not interested in men, and you don’t need them, either. It’s going to be hard going for you,” he concluded.

I had been listening to him with my entire body, and when he finished, I tried to smile again, but all I could do was give an awkward, lopsided shrug. In any case, he wasn’t looking at me any longer – leaning on his walking stick, he heaved himself up noisily, clapped me on the back with his broad, dry palm, and walked away. His words had left me with a bitter feeling. The bitterness spread along my arms and legs, throughout my chest. What he said had exposed me – and, at the same time, it had brought me a terrible joy.

Now I was in Crimea to see my mother. She hadn’t come to my father’s funeral. When I asked her why, she said with distaste that she didn’t want to see his mother, her ex-mother-in-law, and I didn’t bring it up again after that. At night, we lay in a little bedroom, side by side on a bed made up with a feather quilt, and talked quietly about the day. Then she’d fall asleep while I went on lying there in the dark, looking at the cold glow of the whitewashed ceiling and the thin tapestry depicting two proud deer, which wavered slightly in the currents of air. On the day I arrived, Minnegel-apa had opened a few bottles of wine and made kasha and mayonnaise salad; drunk and sated, everyone had wandered back to their rooms, and only my mother and I could not fall asleep. We sat savouring our cigarettes and talking in the dark shadow of the old chestnut tree. The air smelled of cooling leaves. A single cigarette wasn’t enough, and each of us lit another. The orange ember of her slim cigarette flickered and flared. We threw the stubs into a jar of water that Minnegel-apa had given my mother. She didn’t like for women to smoke, but my mother had whiningly reminded her that she was 44 years old. I’d been waiting for this moment all day, and now I finally said to my mother that my father’s meningitis was a consequence of AIDS. I told her I was worried about her HIV status; I asked if she and my father had used protection when they lived together. My mother exhaled noisily – she was smoking a sweetish Glamour – and replied that my father had insisted on condoms himself. “Even before he died,” she said, “I went to the doctor with a yeast infection, and they ran all the tests; my HIV test was negative.” My mother seemed unmoved, and I was shocked by the cold superiority with which she talked about my father. She couldn’t share in my anxiety, my disorientation. At the time, I thought of her indifference as betrayal.

1. All photographs are from Toma Gerzha’s series Control Refresh.