Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

But the thing is that there was another person who did not get lucky that time—the one of whose posthumous truth my father became the keeper, until he perished himself: the man who created the magical palace of my childhood fairytales, and then hung himself—right in time not to see his creation crippled. He, then, he is the one with the worst luck of all, although this really has nothing to do with Pavlo Ivanovych; this, in relation to him, is a pure and simple natural disaster. And Pavlo Ivanovych probably never thought about that man at all, and forgot how that whole story began, so isn’t it better just to erase it from your sight, so as not to complicate your already complicated life? Delete, delete.

It is at this point that something ursine inside me rears up on its back legs and growls: Hands off! I won’t let go! I wonder why it never occurred to me before that I, basically, spent my entire journalistic career doing what my father gave his life for—defending someone else’s essentially deleted truths? I gave voice to the lacunae of intentionally created silences. We are of different blood, Pavlo Ivanovych and I.

A KGB dynasty, that just blows your mind. Our family’s second-generation KGB man—just like the family doctors people have in Victorian novels: from one generation to the next, from mother to daughter.

It’s a profession: creating silences. Forging voices, layering the fake ones over the ones that have been stifled—so that no one could ever discern the muted truth. We have different professions, too, Pavlo Ivanovych and I—with directly opposite goals. No wonder we couldn’t reach an understanding. No matter how hard he tried.

It’s like when a bruised spot regains feeling after the immediate shock of the impact, only to fire up with pain later, when you think everything has turned out okay: with every step along the peeling, not-for-tourists St. Sofia wall, stained with damp patches and indelible graffiti, I succumb to an increasingly corrosive sense of disappointment. A feeling that I’ve erred in something, like I screwed up, missed something important, let it out of sight.... And lost a truly invaluable consultant for VMOD-Film, the single person, perhaps, from the entire KGB corps whom I needed, who was—literally—written in my stars, as one’s most important friendships and loves are written. How many things of the kind you’d never read anywhere must he have learned from his late father, the “banditism fighter”! Things you’d never dig up from the archives, either: the most toxic “material evidence” of the Stalinist era, the evidence that might very well make the slaughter sprees of the Khmer Rouge and of Comrade Mao’s cannibals look like training exercises for a volunteer militia—that kind of evidence, no doubt, flew into the fire back in that first wave of panic, in 1954, following The Leader of the People’s death. How did he say these were marked in their registries? “Document destroyed as one not constituting historical value”? Crap, I’ve gotten so used to being recorded, I can’t be sure I remembered everything right. Those fighters did not leave memoirs behind, either, for perfectly understandable reasons—but they may have told their children some things, and Pavlo Ivanovych is certain to know a lot more about that era than he wishes to reveal to me. Even if he is not aware of anything specific concerning Olena Dovgan who died on November 6, 1947. Or the man who was the cause of her death: I pointed him out in the picture, too—the last one on the right.

I came at it from the wrong angle. I counted on being able to see, finally, once I got my hands on Gela’s case (which, for some reason, I had also imagined to be a fat folder with strings tied around it), a clearly and precisely documented, factual skeleton of her death, with the first and last names of everyone involved, that would give me the springboard from which I, without much trouble, could edit my footage (Vadym did get it for me from the studio) and show on the screen, as if turned inside out, the whole story as I know it—know it anyway, without the SBU archives, but by feel, through my own life; through Artem’s basement and its rickety desk; through Aidy, Vlada, love, dreams; by the same blind and unerring method through which I know the truth about my father’s death.

Except that, no matter how certain this knowing-for-oneself is, it must be firmly attached to the commonly known—facts, dates, and names—if it is to become public knowledge. When did she get married; who was he, the man standing next to her in the picture—an undeniably married couple; and most importantly, how did it come to the betrayal that poor Aidy spent an entire night hunting for in his dreams? And what did it look like from the MGB offices where the operational plans were developed, and where the records of interrogations were kept and bound (They had to have been!) into someone’s as-yet unlocated folder with the label “Agent case” (That would be the one, yes?)? Without this factual dimension—even if it’s only five percent of the material, it is essential as yeast is to dough—Gela’s story cannot become a bona fide document, but will remain as it is—a story that belongs to the one telling it. My own story—lame-assed docu-fiction.

And I can’t put it together only as I see it; I can’t turn my own life inside out, make it into a movie for wide release. I can’t show how Gela summoned me to tell about her death: how she tossed it to me from her photograph, like ball lightning—a white flash, the blast of hundreds of spotlights in the instant of an accidental orgasm in an uncomfortable position, on a rickety desk, in a basement of a certain academic institute—how she connected her life to mine like a torn-off wire and, like a skillful radio operator, cleaned the terminals. I can’t put Aidy’s dreams into the film—or even that last one that we dreamt together (even though I told Pavlo Ivanovych the name of the last man on the right, as it came to me in that dream—Mykhailo—without, of course, revealing my source; it was a gesture of pure desperation on my part—a name without the last name wouldn’t get you anywhere even in the British archives, never mind ours). I know that the story of Olena Dovganivna’s love and death that I have recovered is true because my own life vouches for it—but I can’t bind my life to her case. Without a few critical pieces of documentation, which, let’s face it, can only be supplied by the very country against which Olena Dovgan had waged her war, her story, in other people’s eyes, would be no different from the movies my mom used to play in her mind after her conversations with Pavlo Ivanovych so as not to go mad. Facts, facts, Miss Goshchynska. Facts for the editing table, be so kind as to oblige. Names, passwords, safe houses, everything as it’s supposed to be....

I manage to jump into an alcove just in time—a black BMW speeds up from behind me, from Zolotovoritska, tears past me like a tornado, splashing water from a fetid puddle upwards in a grimy arc that’s as tall as me. Had I been on the sidewalk—I’d have been drenched head to toe. Jackasses! Rich jerks.

My having counted on Pavlo Ivanovych’s assistance (and to know how little I need—damn it, I could fit it into a cigarette pack!) came from the same mythical certainty that everything hidden is really out there somewhere, just waiting for its digger. Essentially, I was counting on finding precisely the same kind of original source whose absence prevents the four string-bound folders in Mom’s attic from yielding engineer Goshchynsky’s buried truth. I had been certain that I only needed to recover Gela’s case from the archives to have everything fall instantly into place—to have the last empty boxes filled. That the case simply would not be there—that the country against which Olena Dovgan had waged her war would manage, after its own demise, to outmaneuver both her and me by pretending that Olena Dovgan never even existed—for this I, the naïve cow, was utterly unprepared. I had been taught that manuscripts did not burn, hadn’t I, and I was always a straight-A student. And now what? What am I supposed to do? Where am I to look?

A bricked-up gate. No Exit.

Daryna Goshchynska, you are an idiot. People have been screwing you over in a particularly cynical manner your entire life, and you did not even notice it.

And the funniest thing is—I can’t help it that I do find something about Pavlo Ivanovych irresistibly likeable. Is this a variety of Stockholm Syndrome, or common gratitude? Because he is, really, my benefactor—it was he who, a quarter of a century ago, held my life in his hands: had he decided to score himself another star with my mom’s case, I would’ve ended up in some godforsaken home for orphaned children. I’d be making my living at a beltway truck stop now. Or in the subway. I once went on a news assignment about what went on there at night, saw a peroxide blonde the cops pulled out from a storage room: she looked sixty and turned out to be younger than me—thirty-four. A black eye and arms poked with more needle holes than a sieve. The typical career of a Soviet orphanage graduate.

We’re bound up together, Pavlo Ivanovych and I—and there’s no avoiding it. But beyond that, there’s something about him—although yes, he is second-generation, and yes he is Tenth Bureau, select and proven—something appealing in a very human way, something boyish, even vulnerable. It’s no picnic, of course—having to watch, in your mature years, what you spent your entire life serving collapse: watching people pilfer left and right from the archive where you spent umpteen years like a chained guard dog. And for what?—while some quicker-witted Major Mitrokhin was carefully copying and stuffing into his shoe soles all that “material evidence” that was supposed to be destroyed as “not constituting historical value,” and when the right moment came, sold it all to the Brits, and now sails his yacht on the Thames or somewhere like that, the bastard. And you sit, like a toad in a bog, in the dungeon on Zolotovoritska, guarding the stacks of gaping lacunae, and wait for your pension, which will be just enough to buy you a few fishing rods—and whose fault is that? There’s something moving about this, I’m telling you, as there is about any human defeat. (Aidy is sure to laugh at me; he’s already said I’m walking around all sentimental like it’s the first day of my period.... ) Or is it that I just have a soft spot for losers? At least for Soviet losers—in that system, losers were the only likeable people. And now, I still pick the people whom you could call the losers of the new 1991 vintage, from the ruins of the empire—I find them more appealing than their high-flying colleagues who, at the right time, found themselves closer to the Party’s coffers. Thusly is Boozerov so much more appealing than Major Mitrokhin. Even though Mitrokhin performed a historic act, and my Boozerov can’t even supply me with a meager couple of certificates in exchange for hourly pay.

How are you not an idiot, Miss Daryna, Daryna Anatoliivna?

I pluck another cigarette from my purse and light up as I walk.

I gave it one last shot, back in Pavlo Ivanovych’s office. There was still a small chance. A teensy-weensy little one, a rabbit’s tail of a chance. I grasped at it as I stared, in my dead-end desperation, at the picture with the five young people standing in a row, dressed in the uniforms of a forgotten army, four men and the woman in a column of light—the picture I thought I knew like a lover’s body, down to the tiniest mole, and yet I missed the most obvious thing: death! That’s where the key might be. I’ve always only thought about Gela’s death, separately from the others, but they had a shared death, one for all five, and it happened, if one could believe GB paperwork and dates at all, on November 6, 1947. And that, by the way, is a not just a regular day—that’s the eve of the Great October Socialist Revolution’s 30th anniversary, “the 7th of November is the Red Day of the calendar” as the children’s poem went; they most certainly did not just pick that date at random—it all looks like a long-planned operation, primed for a big-occasion report to the higher-ups!

I’m old enough to remember those ritual pre-holiday, nationwide convulsions: reports from the miners and the steelworkers, from the workers of the fields and the animal farms—this is how much we have mined, milked, melted, and harvested for the Great October’s 60th anniversary; and the workers of the jails and execution chambers must have also reported, correspondingly—this is how many we have arrested and eliminated, so this operation had been planned as a sure win in advance; the squad Gela’s unit encountered had come for a certain victory. They had come after easy prey—after medals, ranks, vacations, engraved watches, and cigarette cases with ruby-encrusted Kremlins on them. They knew where they were going: someone had shown them. I could feel the trail of treachery quivering within my grasp, like a rabbit’s tail.

“What if you looked by date,” I asked Pavlo Ivanovych.

“How do you mean?” he asked, on guard.

“What if you just, you know, checked the Lviv GB archives for November of 1947? To see if there’s a report about the liquidation, on the Lviv Oblast territory, of a five-member bandit group, four men and one woman, timed for the Great October Revolution’s 30th anniversary—that’s not a needle in a haystack, is it?”

Pavlo Ivanovych again blinked his protuberant eyes at me in that strange way of his, as if his eyelids twitched—and looked away immediately: “That wouldn’t be here, it would be in the Lviv archives.”

“No, Pavlo Ivanovych,” I said, as kindly as I could, “it is here. It’s all here, in the central archives—all the plans for the liquidation of the postwar resistance are here, the entire ‘buried war,’ almost a hundred volumes, code name Bear Den. If you gave me access to these files, I’d be happy to look myself. But you won’t give me access, will you?”

“I’ve no authority,” muttered Pavlo Ivanovych. My inside knowledge was clearly a surprise for him; he’s new to this territory—a journalistic investigation—he’s not used to it. He’s used to dealing with a different demographic—harmless scholars no one cares about, quiet academic historians, acne-ridden students, and bespectacled postdocs who submit their inquiries composed in compliance with form N-blah-blah-blah, who receive the answer “the document is not found,” and politely write it down as a research outcome—he is used to the absence of material strength. So I even felt a stab of professional pride: Don’t mess with us! He’d look, Pavlo Ivanovych promised. It was at that moment that it crystallized—the impression I got that for some reason he really would rather not look. And if I called him back in two weeks, like he told me to, he would again shrug regretfully and report, with his officer’s word, that he did not find anything.

Daryna Anatoliivna, Daryna Anatoliivna...

Actually, now that I think about it, I must have picked up that vibe a bit later—when he was escorting me back to the entrance and, no longer having anything to add, kept talking anyway, as if someone forgot to turn him off—talked on and on, like sand out of a gashed sack. He even reminded me, for the first time in our entire interaction, of that captain with shifty black eyes who had once “interviewed” me in the chancellor’s office before I began my pre-graduation field studies—they talk you to death, these people. Old schooling, done by the same old textbook, and what dickhead wrote those?

Pavlo Ivanovych, for some reason, started on his father again—as if he were still trying to play in the same sandbox, make his father friends with my hero, with the old man’s former adversary, make it all nice; there was one thing in that whole verbal torrent that stuck out and stayed with me—it didn’t sound like something Pavlo Ivanovych made up on the fly—that his father told him, in moments of sincerity (When he was drunk?) that he, Boozerov Senior, had “a lot of respect” for the banderas (this did sound like a straight calque from Russian), because the way they, the banderas, “stood up for their cause” was something “we” (one would understand this to mean both Boozerovs’—father and son’s—colleagues) still had to “watch and learn.” How about that?

Pavlo Ivanovych had said something similar about my mom, except not about the banderas but about her loyalty to her husband, that he would have liked it if his wife “stood up” for him like that—apparently he was having some trouble at work then, Pavlo Ivanovych was—and my poor mom was so proud of this KGB compliment that she remembered it for the rest of her life. I must confess, however, that I suspect this almost-dissident’s (Heaven help us, were they all dissidents back then?) respect for the banderas on behalf of Boozerov Senior stems exclusively from the fact that they were the ones who crippled him: all these “banditism fighters,” just like common bandits, respect only those who can kick their asses, and the harder their asses get kicked, the greater respect they feel for the one who did the kicking. But, so as not to ignore Pavlo Ivanovych’s aspirations to fulfill the official presidential policy of national reconciliation completely, I mumbled agreeably that it seemed like at some point, while working on the film, I came across this name—Captain Boozerov, could it have been his father? But this, for some reason, did not make Pavlo Ivanovych happy, as I had expected it would, and he only said that his father retired in the rank of the major—straight from the hospital. Captain Boozerov, then, had paid a steep price for his promotion.

That’s what I’ll say to Aidy: I went after Gela, and got Captain Boozerov, damn it! (Really, though, where did I hear this captain?) And, okay, there’s a miniscule, microscopic chance that Pavlo Ivanovych, for old times’ sake, will be moved to look in the surviving part of the archives where I so helpfully pointed him. And will, after all, produce out of its dark depths the victorious report of a certain MGB anti-banditism squad written just in time for the Great October’s 30th anniversary. And yet somehow, I find this very hard to believe. I failed to evoke in Pavlo Ivanovych the appropriate level of professional enthusiasm; I failed to recruit him....

I wonder how many people he recruited in his day, when he was still on operational duty? And now all their cases are sitting somewhere in his stacks, and he knows them, those people; he might be following their careers and could at any time pick up his phone, call someone like Aidy’s professor who squealed at me at The Cupid, and express his wish for something practical in exchange for his silence. Not much fat to be had off an old professor like that, of course, but there’re bigger fish—tons of them, whole schools of them that rushed, like salmon to spawn, into politics and government after 1991, to build up the country that had finally freed itself. And they, too, thought they had freed themselves—from the agreements they had signed with the KGB—they were giddy with freedom.... Meanwhile, Pavlo Ivanovych just sat, like a spider, in his dungeon and spun the threads of new dependencies. Maybe his life isn’t as hard as I so charitably worried it might be, and by the time he retires he, too, will have, bit by bit, put aside enough for his own modest yacht to sail the Dnieper—and the climate here, thank goodness, is so much better than London’s. And I foolishly thought I’d tempt him with my consultant’s fees—two fifty an hour, money I don’t even have yet. Come to think of it, I don’t have any money at all. You’re such a nitwit, Miss Daryna, Daryna Anatoliivna....

“Miss Daryna! Daryna Anatoliivna!”

Someone’s actually calling after me, and I didn’t hear it...I feel as if I’ve been caught in the middle of something indecent—it’s always like that when people recognize me in the street: an instant transition, like being captured in the sudden light from the soffits, like being catapulted from the darkness of the audience straight onto the proscenium: Hoop-la, the thunder of the applause, you turn around, stand there like a pillar of salt, grinning a plastic grin; oh shit, are my trousers splattered with mud in the back?

A girl—plump, dark-haired, and pretty cute, an expensive leather jacket thrown open, scarf messed up on the run. She’s breathing hard, wide-open eyes like plums, spellbound, she’s glowing, so thrilled she can hardly see straight: She made it! As if she’s run a marathon to catch up with me.

“Daryna Goshchynska!” She is not asking, but triumphing like a soccer fan who’s spotted Andriy Shevchenko and can’t wait to shout to the whole world about it, name, exclamation mark, pointing finger—look, look!—before her deity disappears or changes itself into something completely different as deities in every myth are wont to do.

“Ooff!” She’s trying to catch her breath, hand on her chest—some rack she’s got there, C-cup at least—she shakes her head, laughing at herself now—at her breathlessness, at having run, and having caught up with me, and at having me stand now here before her, and at it being spring, and at the downpour that’s just passed, and at the sun shining—and I smile, too, infected, unwittingly, with this puppy-like burst of her young youthful energy: What a funny girl! Sweaty, flushed, clothes in a mess.

“I’m so sorry...I recognized you from afar; I’m so glad I caught you.” She’s still not taking her gawking black eyes off me, her plump-lipped mouth is stretched ear to ear; this must be the first time she’s seen Daryna Goshchynska live: “I would very much like to invite you, may I? Here!” she exhales, full-chest. “Take this, please.”

A white, or rather, a gray butterfly—a cheap booklet, on thin paper, like all free concert invitations.

“On the twenty-fourth...in the Grand Hall at the Conservatory...”

“Thank you.” I react with my standard working smile now, and put the flyer, without reading, into my purse: I’ll throw it out later, I get mountains of this junk every month, and the mail’s not letting up yet—the news that Daryna Goshchynska no longer works on television has not yet gained national currency. It’ll be a full year before my name is taken off all the mailing lists, and I must say something encouraging to the girl: “Your concert? Congratulations.”

“It’s our class concert...for our whole year, I’m in the second half. Piano, it’s in the program...I have two pieces—Britten and Gubaidulina.”

“Difficult composers,” I nod knowingly, about to wish her the best of success, anoint her with a ritual blessing by way of taking my leave: go with God, child—but the child has no intention of giving up so quickly, she needs to pour it all out, since she’s caught me, and, without giving me a chance to break away with another word, she bursts forth, like rainwater gushing from a gutter.

“This is my first serious performance, Miss Daryna, please come if you can, please. It would mean so much to me! It’s so important for me, if only you knew.” She clasps her hands prayerfully to her C-cup breasts, which protrude vigorously under her leather jacket and the fashionable short sweater under it, so that a pale strip of her belly winks every time she moves—the current fashion is meant for stick figures, and this girl—nothing to complain about—sports a good childbearing shape, but her hands—her hands are made for the piano indeed: large, with beautiful long fingers. And who wouldn’t melt a little hearing this: “You are my hero, I watch your every show; I haven’t missed one in two years! I even ran away from a date once, to watch it.”

“Thank you,” I say, waiting for her to ask me why the show didn’t air last Wednesday; I have to change the topic: “That’s very nice to hear, but running away from a date—that seems a bit much, doesn’t it? Unless the boy wasn’t anything special.”

She wrinkles her nose, laughingly shines her enamored bovine eyes at me, and concedes that he was not anything special: a moment of female solidarity; we are both laughing. This is it, my audience. This is what I have managed to accomplish in my life. How many of them are out there, across the country, girls and boys like this? Lord, the letters I used to get! This is Diogenes’ Lantern and I’m Daryna Goshchynska, stay with us. And they’ve stayed; they haven’t even noticed my absence yet.