Elara S. Novikova
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Me on a cemetery path in Kyiv with a folded map and flowers I did not leave.

Baikove has been taking people since 1834 and stopped taking most of them in 1968, and the map at the entrance is the sort that assumes you already know where you are going. I did not. I knew one grave. Hlushkov is here, under a monument with a named sculptor and a named architect, and finding him took twenty minutes of walking and one confident wrong turn.

I had come with three other names. Yushchenko, who wrote the address programming that made those machines usable by anybody. Shkabara, who built the control unit of the first one. Glivenko, who was in the same room for the same years. I have spent two years reading about all three and I cannot tell you where any of them lies, because it is not written down anywhere I can reach, and the one list I could read does not carry them.

The man in the office was patient and had nothing. That is not his failure and it is not a scandal. It is simply the shape of the thing: a record keeps the person it was built to keep, and everyone else is filed under weather. I did not photograph the stone. I bought flowers with nowhere to put them.

travelternary-dreamsresearchkyivbaikove cemeteryshkabarayushchenko
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