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Jason Z. Morris
and, with immense gratitude, to my parents, Eric and Willa Morris.
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When he landed in Kiev, Adam had to wait nearly two hours for his connecting flight to JFK. It was four-thirty a.m. in New York. Adam checked his messages. Nothing. After an internal struggle, he decided couldn’t call for at least another hour and a half. The wait was excruciating. He drank a decaf coffee as slowly as he could and then decided to try killing time in a bookstore. Most of the titles on the shelves were written in Cyrillic and were useless even as a distraction, but he did see a guidebook written in English. As far as Adam could make out from the maps he found in the book, the places his family had lived for centuries—almost all within a hundred miles of Kiev—didn’t even exist anymore. Whole villages had succumbed to butchery, had been erased.
He paced as he watched planes take off, feeling more and more on edge. “There was no way that coffee was decaf,” he thought. The frequent announcements in Ukrainian or Russian, he wasn’t sure which, weren’t helping his nerves, either. The music of the language was close enough to Yiddish to call out for his attention, but the words meant nothing he could understand. He tried to read his biography of Duke Ellington, but he couldn’t focus. He wondered if the Ukrainians around him would recognize the Hebrew lettering on the bookmark he had picked up at his hotel; he put the book back in his bag. He checked his watch and decided it was late enough to call Danny, at least. If his grandfather had gotten home from the hospital already, Adam didn’t want to wake him this early.
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