In the late evenings — at 9 o’clock — right at my bedtime he would tune in to the distant sounds of Voice of America turning the dial left & right on a shortwave radio, shorting out the jammers. It was a better kind of propaganda — one with raspberries sold all-year round all over urban & rural America. In émigré Russe, he heard a Russian that wasn’t born into the proletariat class. The broadcasts existed somewhere between the pages of a dictionary & a novel. He found an otherness he craved, a freedom of both spoken & unspoken — a priori madness of the Soviet kind. He listened for the sounds of love, the way it was expressed & held. The war played out in voices outside of history, outside of economic facts. Capitalism, in its nudity, — the enslaved, idealize enslavement he used to say.

I don’t remember his voice in glowing Russian. The many recordings he made at Amoco, mother lost or threw away in a Chicago dumpster in an alley behind our apartment. A city soldered out of industrial smoke. The ones I interpreted for him late into evening. The ones that kept him employed. English would never come easily, it would never come at all. I saw it all — the slaughter of the slaughtered. My children know my voice. Would I recognize his?