Reva's Cat: "Letter of Apology" by Maria Reva

For an American like me who doesn't know much about Ukraine other than as the current center of Washington's three-ring circus, there are two choices when reading a short story like "Letter of Apology" by Maria Reva (available from Granta here). I can spend hours trying to learn about Ukraine, at least enough to have some deeper understanding of the story, or I can just take what the story tells me about Ukraine and accept and read it on that level. I'm opting for the latter.

I did have to cheat and use what little bit I do know in order to get the time down. I believe the story is set when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union, because there is still a KGB and it is still possible for Ukrainians to think they might be sent to Moscow for special duty. It's later in the Soviet Union's life, because there is now a kinder, gentler KGB that wants to convince political thought criminals of the error of their ways rather than just throw them in jail.

What the narrator needs to convince someone to do

The story opens with a joke. Konstantyn Illych Boyko, a popular Ukrainian poet, has told a political joke after a reading. Mikhail Igorovich is the KGB agent assigned to coax a letter of apology out of Boyko. We don't actually get to read the joke, because it's so offensive, it has been proactively expurgated from the file Igorovich gets. The KGB likes it when people apologize on their own, within thirty days, rather than having to put the screws to them. They still use the threat of repercussions to get the apology, but they prefer to dangle the threat over the political offender's head rather than actually use it.

Boyko, unfortunately, is stubborn. Although Igorovich usually gets an apology letter out of the people he is assigned to well before thirty days are up, Boyko insists he has nothing to apologize for. He's a politically pure communist, he says, and he quotes Lenin to prove it.

Igorovich's self-delusion

As Igorovich hounds Boyko, he is in turn hounded by Boyko's wife, Milena Markivna. While Igorovich is following Boyko, meaning to deliver the message that this will not go away until Boyko apologizes, he finds that Markivna is following him. It turns out that Markivna's entire family was erased by the KGB when Markivna was a child. The reader realizes she's probably plotting revenge against the KGB by taking it out on Igorovich, but Igorovich manages to miss the threat because of the extraordinary self-delusion he practices.

Both his mother and his father were also disappeared by the KGB when he was a child. However, unlike Markivna, Igorovich chose to believe the lies people told him about what happened to his parents. He believes his mother was chosen for special duty guarding Lenin's tomb. He later believes his father got to go join her. He is aware that something doesn't quite add up with what he's been told-- "I could not reconcile the immense honor of the invitation with the grief that plagued the family"--but he has managed his whole life to push these doubts down.

One of the characteristics of Igorovich that helps him to repress his own doubts is a common logical fallacy many humans believe, the "just world fallacy." His parents were good people, he thinks, so something good must have happened to them. He suffers from the particular delusion that the world works in an orderly way. It's why he assumed everyone will willingly sign a letter of apology:

"Most people fail to grasp the simple logic of the situation: that once a transgression occurs and a case file opens, the case file triggers a response--in this case, a letter of apology. One document exposes the problem, the second resolves it. One cannot function without the other, just as the bolt cannot function without a nut and a nut cannot function without a bolt." 

It's a moral version of Newtonian physics. Everything is operating according to well-ordered rules. But Igorovich also has a quantum physics-inspired moral stance. While watching the Soviet animated movie Hedgehog in the Fog, because Boyko is also watching it, he considers the meaning of the Hedgehog character wondering whether a white horse would drown if the horse fell asleep in the fog. This triggers a chain of thoughts in the narrator:

I suppose what Hedgehog means is: if the white horse stops moving, we would no longer see it in the white fog. But if we no longer see it, what is its state? Drowned or not? Dead or alive? The question is whether Hedgehog would prefer to keep the fog or have it lift to discover what is behind its thick veil. I would keep the fog. For instance, I cannot know the whereabouts of my parents because they are part of me and therefore part of my personal file and naturally no one can see their own file, just like no one can see the back of their own head. My mother is standing proud among the Honor Guard. My mother is standing elsewhere. She is sitting. She is lying down. She is cleaning an aquarium while riding an elevator. Uncertainty contains an infinite number of certainties. My mother is in all these states at once, and nothing stops me from choosing one. Many people claim they like certainty, but I do not believe this is true – it is uncertainty that gives freedom of mind. And so, while I longed to be reassigned to Moscow, the thought of it shook me to the bones with terror.

Much like in Schrodinger's Cat experiment, Igorovich believes that if he simply never finds out what happened to his parents, he can go on believing anything he wants. He can preserve his belief in a just universe. He can think the KGB isn't capricious, doesn't punish people arbitrarily or wrongly. He can keep doing his job.

The cat eventually gets out of the bag...or box

Igorovich's self-delusion is so strong, he convinces himself that the reason Markivna is following him is because she is a powerful official vetting him for an important job, like the one he thinks his mother had. He thinks the difficulty he is having getting the letter is just part of the test. I won't give away the ending, but his delusion is finally broken. The "letter of apology" we get is his own, apparently told in the form of the short story we have just read. Ultimately, we cannot forever willfully refuse to find out the truth. We cannot leave the cat in the box indefinitely, thinking that as long as we do not observe what happened to it, we can believe whatever we want.

The story has, I imagine, special meaning for Ukraine now as it tries, like so many Latin American countries, to uncover the truth of what happened during decades of state security running amok. The state's KGB archives were opened in 2015, meaning the country has a long slog through paperwork to find out a lot of secrets many want to know.

What meaning does this story have for an American reader? I suppose the notion of resisting state security has some resonance today. Although we aren't living in a police state like 1970s Ukraine, we do have a threat from technology that makes state security potentially far more invasive than at any time in American history. For non-technical citizens like myself, it is tempting to just not pay attention to the issues, to let the cat sit in the box and assume things will work themselves out. But of course, this kind of abandonment of democratic responsibility won't do, and we all have to try as best as we can to watch the state that watches us.

But there's a more direct reading, one that's almost not even political. We all face the temptation to practice the cognitive fallacies Igorovich practiced. We all can be made fools, unable to process data we face if that data wasn't in the files we were given. "Reva's Cat" stresses that the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment shouldn't be applied wantonly to moral questions.