The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  Of course, he didn’t really build it; he was just one of the experts who performed the engineering calculations, a newly-minted PhD with a suitably themed dissertation, a humble nut in a great machine really—if he stepped away, no one would have noticed. Several days later the man who actually built the place—the lead architect who had to have been there in that laughing swarm of Very Important Men receiving their congratulations and basking in his glory—left the office of the Central Committee’s Secretary, went to the bathroom, locked the stall, and hung himself on his own belt. His palace turned out to be too good for Kyiv. It overshadowed the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, and that was not just indecency and arrogance, but a grave political misstep for which the Kyiv authorities were getting their asses thoroughly kicked, and those asses had to be saved by making steps, taking measures, and finding someone to blame, preferably, by opening a criminal inquiry into the theft of construction materials, but when their best candidate for the role of the thieving conspirator so blatantly refused to play along—going so far as to hang himself in the Committee’s very own building—the inquiry, thank God and His new charge, was first postponed, and then disappeared altogether, as if flushed down the toilet, without a trace, so that soon everyone forgot about it, perfectly naturally, considering how often these things happened, impossible to keep track of them all.

  Instead, Palace Ukraina was promptly closed “for renovation” and its interior efficiently stripped of the tasteful finishes, and everything—the carefully varnished beech parquet floors; the dove-gray, worsted-wool upholstery; the stained-glass lamps—was replaced with whatever was cruder, cheaper, and plebeian, so that when it opened again, a couple of months later, with the acid-blue armchairs that are still there today, I did not recognize the magical palace of my fairytales: it was gone, disappeared into thin air just as a fairytale palace would if a genie picked it up and carried it to the other side of the world in one night. Only then we at least would have had the emptiness that alone can be a fitting monument for the structure that had perished (as Ground Zero remained for years, an abysmal wound among Lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers, but we have seen our share of wounds like that long before—how many of them gape, like knocked-out teeth, in Kyiv’s streets, marking the sites of blown-up churches, of which only those whose place hasn’t been taken by a grain elevator or a Young Pioneers’ Palace are still remembered). But this palace stood right where it had been, obligingly and garishly retrofitted to resemble a humble provincial movie theater, all in one piece, and with the same name, so that one could begin to believe that the other, the original, was a figment of the collective imagination, something we all happily hallucinated together, after too much champagne, but we’re sober now, tovarishchi, and that’s what reality looks like: just an unfortunate mishap, an old story, really, and not even enough to call it a story—a bit of oversight, the guilty have been reprimanded, back to work.

  Mom recalled that at first there were quite a few of them—Father’s colleagues from the institute, the Academy of Sciences, and the National Construction Research institute—who were charged with calculating a corrected budget that would demonstrate that the supplies had been overpriced and who had refused to do so, standing by the original calculations. After about a year, during which the whole mess was mostly forgotten, the dust settled, and the Party had a grand time assembling for its annual Congress at the Palace Ukraina, thus providing a conclusive blessing for its humbled innards, and someone especially stubborn had been officially reprimanded, someone else was threatened to be “reduced in force,” and some—these must’ve been the least protected, the poor doctoral students—had to leave Kyiv and go build cinemas (if not cow barns!) in small towns, my father alone remained to brandish, in the shadow of the ax that already hung above his neck, the truth that no one cared to hear. Perhaps, from the vantage point of an imposing paneled office it did look like madness: What the fuck is wrong with that freak? Who does he think he is?

  Being, like my mom, a hard-skulled humanitarian, all I managed to comprehend from a cursory inspection of the folders in the attic—touched fearfully, suspiciously, like a clump of dried snake skins—was that after a while the case wasn’t about the construction costs anymore: the plot had twisted and coiled on itself, involving more and more agencies, sprouting new limbs, each one more phantasmagoric than the one before, and only Father continued to attach his original reports in defense of the crippled project to every new petition, to show where it all began—with a precision that his addressees must have found very irksome—so his petitions grew thicker as they rolled back and forth in layers of cross-references and official evasive responses and additional evidence and more evasions from higher-level offices and then his complaints about being threatened in a lower-level office and about the anonymous phone calls relating the same threats he’d received at home and about a bizarre fight at the entrance to our apartment building when several strangers beat him up (this, I remember, happened not too long before the loony bin—it must’ve been the last warning). The case dragged on for years, gathering speed and mass like a paper avalanche, like the nursery rhyme in which every chorus adds a line, growing into a menacing, galactic force—the rat ate the malt, the cat killed the rat, the dog chased the cat, the cow tossed the dog—and the creatures grow new crumpled horns at every turn, and new ones pop up, cartoon-like, bigger and bigger—the cow, the milkmaid, the man, the priest, all the way to a dinosaur, a T. rex—a whole crew of them that one day comes rolling in an ambulance, wearing white coats, what the fuck, what did you want to prove?

  And that’s basically what happened—and where is the story in that?

  This progressive, thickening nightmare could have been stopped at any time. All one had to do was step out, leave the game; other people did. They stayed alive and did just fine—and to them we must wish many happy returns. These were not just the small fish like Father, convicted on white-collar mismanagement charges—their name is legion—but even the quite conspicuous ones, implicated in the most resonant political scandals, ones whose names thundered across the frequencies of Western radio stations, who performed public acts of civil disobedience—shouted from a public stage, say, before the police could pin them to the floor, or threw themselves against the locked doors of an ostensibly public court hearing, or went to the Shevchenko monument on the poet’s anniversary, a single moment that could earn enough dissident credibility to last one’s life. And then, after 1991, they could write memoirs and book speaking engagements, which is precisely what most of them did, never once mentioning how it was that they got out.

  One suspects they didn’t get out completely clean, one surmises they did get soiled, just a little: wrote a confessional letter, say, or perchance performed even more intimate rites of contrition and absolution (complete with promises to behave nicely henceforth) behind closed doors. Who today cares to find out? Who cares? They got out and worked, according to their professions; they received promotions, raised children, and improved their living conditions—so somewhere in those fetid infernal corridors there must have been the door, however narrow, with the green EXIT sign above it, a real, tangible way out, indicated on the emergency evacuation plans. After all we’re not talking about Stalinism here, ladies and gentlemen; this is the era of Socialism with a human face, which, translated, means if you really wanted to live, there was a choice.

  This is why there could not be any doubt that my father tightened the noose around his neck with his own hands, and that’s what it must have looked like to the people who ultimately determined his fate, and that’s what it looked like to my mother, and that’s what I learned to think as well, when I got older—that he didn’t leave the already-revved juggernaut any room for maneuver, that he made a strategic mistake, erred, miscalculated. This is sad and painful, but there’s nothing we can do, and we must live on. Really, not that different than if he’d literally been run over by a truck.

  And another thing: as I grew older, I began to
feel ashamed of him. Compared to my classmates in school and even more so those at the university, my father was a loser, not someone I could brag about. When asked directly, as when one had to stand up in front of the entire class and report one’s parents’ occupations to the teacher, for the roster (and she doesn’t hear it the first time, so one has to repeat it, louder), I would squirm and mutter, eyes down, “Group-one disability,” and sit down, hearing, I thought, the class whisper and giggle behind my back. Such things are hard to digest—children can never forgive their parents for humiliating them.

  His death at home—they let him go home when his kidneys failed after another long course of “treatment”—could do no more than add guilt to the shame: mix a spoon of soda with a spoon of salt, and time kept blending the two together into a thinning bitterly salty mix that nothing could sweeten, neither the increasingly frequent enthusiastic letters (especially post-1991, and even more so once my face became a regular fixture on TV) from his former colleagues and students about what a great teacher he was and how much they all, it turns out, loved him (Where were they then?), nor our producer’s very tangible offer to raise the story with Palace Ukraina from its thirty-year-old tomb in the archives and fashion my father a glamorous, albeit posthumous, almost-dissident biography. Here was a real opportunity, a chance to restore to people’s minds the forgotten pages of recent history (as if the people in question had any unforgotten pages of history, recent or distant). The idea was not bad, but it was nipped in the bud by one well-known poet—one of those once widely read, with patriotic verses and a vague victim-of-the-regime claim. Interestingly enough, I wanted to interview her on the occasion of her birthday—and found myself in a knockdown: the draft-horse-sized harpy with a bad bite spent the first half hour spraying me with spit, tossing her head to make the few remaining strands of her dyed hair bounce (which about forty years ago may have signaled to some undemanding men both a temperament of a young ogress and the spirit of an indomitable patriot), and making absolutely sure that I realized how privileged I was to have been granted access to a person who only “interacts with very select people”; she then proceeded to relate, in great detail and with vivid illustrations, as if it had happened the day before, how for her first, fifty-year jubilee—the same year, I quickly calculated, when they gave Stus, also a poet, his second (and deadly) prison sentence—the National Writers’ Union didn’t even send her a congratulatory telegram, but instead mailed her (imagine that!) an invitation to someone else’s reading—the harpy still, twenty-five years later, remembered whose—scheduled, intentionally, no doubt, on the same day, and that’s what it was like, being persecuted! I did not manage to get out of her any other details of the persecution. The harpy didn’t have a story either, only a personal myth, one that must have been promoted by quite a few men dazzled by the then naturally auburn tress-tossing, so that now the glow of their past efforts could warm her vacuous old age, in which she didn’t give a flying fuck about all those friends of her mythical youth who had perished in camps in the middle of nowhere, whose memory, had it survived, perchance would have permitted her to retain some sense of proportion and style.

  I left that apartment and fell to pieces. The vision of dragging my father’s made-up cadaver into the same carnival tent of “the persecuted,” where this veteran martyr held court, soured everything with particular potency, and I proceeded to get most ingloriously drunk at Baraban that night, downing the strongest cocktails like a sorority girl—but they all tasted of soda and salt, and in the morning the hangover reeked of the same, salt and soda. There was no story. I had to make peace with the plain, dumb reality: I was the only evidence that the man had ever existed on this planet. I had his eyes and his blood type. Come to think of it, why would anyone expect anything different? Isn’t this the fate of the human race?

  this!!!—a scribble in the margins, a bauble that slipped out of the suitcase—turned the binoculars for me. For an instant, as if a flash of lightning cut through the darkness, I saw a living soul, and the strange thing was that it was the same father about whom I, against my best instincts, continued to feel ashamed. His only place in any historical narrative was that of a nameless extra, a statistical value—one of the myriad, if they could ever be counted, whose names were not listed by Amnesty International, who had not been arrested or sent to prisons, but who succumbed, slowly and quietly, in their own beds, to legitimate cardiac arrests and kidney failures, and other disorders, whose causes were clear only to their families if they had any. We could also add those who drank themselves to death and those who killed themselves—the only meaningful history we can craft for the future is the history of numbers, and the more zeros—the better. Six (Or more?) million dead Jews equal the Holocaust. Ten (Or fewer?) million dead Ukrainian peasants equal Holodomor. Three-hundred-million refugees equal the fifty-six local wars at the beginning of the twenty-first century. History is written by accountants.

  During the Khrushchev thaw, officials who issued belated death certificates to the families of those executed in the NKVD prisons came up with all kinds of diseases to fill in the “cause of death” field—thus erasing zeros from the number of executions. Another twenty years later their fictional cardiac arrests and kidney failures became real, as is commonly the case with useful inventions, and literally killed people whose fathers and grandfathers they could beset only on paper, post-factum. Another number was made unreal, and with it, an entire generation lost its common story, leaving its descendants no means of detecting a shared fate—from here, they all look discrete, just people who lived, died, things happened, you know… this one was a decent engineer and a talented lecturer who died from the side effect of a drug, having done his time in a psychiatric clinic with a falsified diagnosis—and that’s it, go ahead, tie those little strings into a dead knot. I needed the inadvertent insight to make the puzzle pieces fall into place—the triumphant snap of fingers, the blue bunny in a school sketchbook, the catchy, generous laugh, the charge of energy that filled the man—to see him from inside and recognize, in that flash, what it was that drove him, had driven him to the end, that had not permitted him to back off and make the single required concession that white was really black: his indomitable abhorrence of his own fear, the physiological mandate from his very healthy and apparently very proud soul (and the soul has its own physiology that does not always agree with that of the body) to reject this fear that had been implanted in him against his will, like viral DNA. If you spend years carrying around something you cannot live with, it might just become easier to crash upon the water than to stop diving.

  In the time I spent with the crumbly book, I experienced a rush of fierce, bone-piercing bliss, as if soaring on a glider: I could be proud of him. Not as my father—he had been gone too long for that—but as a person I could admire had I met him now. It seemed forever since I’d actually met anyone like that (Did they really all die out?), and the unfulfilled need to be around them—not even to be close; I’d be happy to admire my heroes quietly, from the crowd, if only there’d been someone to admire—pulled on my insides, like hunger, like vitamin deficiency or sexual dissatisfaction, and the discovery splashed my face like life-giving water: How could this be, I muttered half-consciously? How could this happen? I put down the book and stumbled around the room, blindly, as if feeling for something I had lost there, then fell back onto the chair and stared, just as blindly, at the same page, while my thoughts looped on themselves, tangled into knots, refusing to register the real shock: How could it be that I really know nothing about him? And won’t ever know—won’t ever find any other evidence of his life as he lived it? He didn’t write private letters, didn’t keep a journal, didn’t leave a single impression of his internal self in any material substance I could find, pick up, turn over—nothing, except a random remark in the margin of a random book.

  this!!!

  * * *

  Since then I have more faith in misplaced trifles than in rehearsed stories, which a
lways feel like something gutted, stuffed, and roasted before being served for me to gobble up. I believe in remembered mannerisms and scribbles in books, accidental scowls caught by a friend’s camera, and strange tooth marks on cigarette holders. I am the detective Columbo of the new century—and please don’t laugh at me! I know that these excavated remains of vanished civilizations, the many, many civilizations that had once existed under people’s names, do not lie. If we have any hope of understanding anything about another’s life, this this!!! is it. We’ve heard all the other stories before, thank you very much, and we’re sick of them.

  I can no more pass up these scattered shiny beads than a raccoon can ignore a broken mirror. And I mean literally: I pick them up and drag them to my lair. I have a whole collection of them already: my own disordered notes in various notebooks, on random scraps of paper, on festival booklets and concert programs, on the backs of press releases, on any other printed matter, and lengths of film from the cutting-room floor, twisted and kept, for reasons unknown, in an old computer box—all in utter disarray. Why, you could very well ask, am I holding on to this poorly scanned drawing by a little girl from Pripyat who died of leukemia and whose strangely unbrokenhearted parents were convinced she’d been destined to artistic fame? It’s hard to tell whether this really was the case: all children’s drawings are interesting, and, in this one, a brown hippo stands on the shore of a blue lake, rounded toward the horizon. The picture didn’t make it into the Chernobyl show (I remember I wanted to keep the program austere, somber, inexorable, no sentiments, no snivels), and the girl’s mother was upset with me: I had taken away her role of the tragically lost young genius’s parent, and what could I give her in return—a dead child? Still, even if there hadn’t been the upset mother and my guilt, I wouldn’t have it in me to kill the picture—so I’m keeping it, as if hoping to find, one day, the proper place for it.