PERSONNEL FILES
“But where is the photograph?”
“Someone removed the photo from Anastasia Vladimirovna’s file.” For two hundred dollars, we obtained the identifying idiosyncrasies of relevant lives. I forced myself to look at Dmitry Tsurko first and soon had him fully inventoried and indexed: small, neat letters, featureless handwriting, but look at the signature: with curlicues like these, the twenty-year-old son of the People’s Commissar must have had a complex vision of his identity.
I had his personnel file, listing Dmitry Tsurko as a cleared employee of the People’s Committee for Foreign Affairs, “without right to publish,” born on December 29th (old style) of 1900, in the city of Kherson. He did not possess expert written command of a single language (there was no doubt that the jo
