The Cabinet

Anatoly Moskvina had twenty-six bodies in his apartment. His parents found them when they showed up unannounced—sitting on the couch, lying in the bed, propped up in the closet like roommates. All women. All young, in the way that matters most when you’re dead: teenage girls and women in their twenties. He’d been exhuming them from graveyards across Russia for years, maybe longer, and just leaving them in his apartment to dry out.

He spoke thirteen languages fluently. He was a historian, the kind of person who knows everything about everything, the kind who should theoretically have options. Instead he was spending his nights in cemeteries with a shovel, digging up the dead and bringing them home. Most of them were teenagers when they died, stolen again years later by a man with a shovel and a very specific kind of loneliness.

There’s a darkness in collecting that way. The impulse usually starts small—you save things that matter to you, things that remind you of something you’re afraid of losing. Maybe he started with photos, or grave rubbings, or just visiting the same cemetery over and over. And then one night the line collapsed and he just started digging. The dead can’t argue with you or leave you or change their minds. They’ll sit wherever you put them. They’re perfect.

You read these stories and you’re supposed to feel horrified, and you should, but there’s also something almost pitiable about it. He’d built an entire life around something that ended the moment someone knocked on his door. And when the police took everything away, he had nothing. An apartment full of empty spaces, thirteen languages, a historian’s worth of knowledge, and absolutely nothing left.