The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  Room 8. Blood in Kyiv

  And just like that, it’s spring outside!

  The sun blasts from everywhere, like an orchestra that’s been waiting, bows poised, for me to emerge from the SBU archive as its signal to launch into a thunderous fanfare—a moist glow with a little blue mixed into it blazes from every crack, every gap between the buildings, and every puddle on the asphalt, and the asphalt along Zolotovoritska gleams like a freshly bathed seal’s back: while I was having my audience with Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov, the world got rained on! Wet tree trunks drip with sweat like the bodies of happy lovers, a whole new stream sprouts cheerily out of a downspout, and the faces of passersby—who had been looking increasingly oppressed and gloomy of late, as though the imminent elections were bringing with them a front of oppressive air into the city—have acquired the silly and joyful expression of those missionaries who call out the good news about Christ in courtyards, in Russian with an American accent, without a clue that they’re about twelve centuries late bringing this news to us; and new grass is so vigorously bright on the lawns it makes you want to turn into a rabbit and hop over to nibble it, and the buds on the trees have been instantly transformed into a visible stubble, into that translucent goldenish mist that envelops the trees in a gentle glimmer like the fuzz on a newborn’s head. Life does, yes, it does have its bright side—as, for example, in Kyiv, in April after a thunderstorm! How did I not hear it roll in? It must’ve come down in torrents—the puddles are still rimmed in white foam—I heard absolutely nothing… it’s totally soundproof in there, like a dungeon.

  And it is a dungeon, that archive of theirs. Artificial lights, eternal dusk. Coming out feels like breaking free from a bomb shelter.

  Two characters, clearly from the same building, smoking on the sidewalk, look up as one and follow me with their eyes. They might be from a different building, too; there’s some sort of a bank next door. Bank employees have the same eyes as the rank and file of secret services. And the same manner: false friendliness and a cold secretiveness. They all looked at me that way—everyone we passed as Pavlo Ivanovych escorted me out: down a hallway, up the stairs, another hallway, another set of stairs, all the way to the check-in turnstile. Return your pass, please. Of course, or else, God forbid, I’d keep it for myself and then what? The signature of the SBU check-in lady on that pathetic piece of paper would be acquired by foreign intelligence agencies?

  There are things that do not change. Names of countries, monuments, language, money, uniforms, military commands, even ways of waging war—these all change. But secret services do not, they are always the same. Always and everywhere, in every country. One out of every six men convicted in the USSR after the war for working in the Nazi police had been an NKVD employee before the war. Had it been, by some bizarre set of circumstances, the American and not the German army that invaded the Soviet Union back then, these men would’ve gone to serve the American democracy—and the American democracy would’ve been just as happy to have them. Because there are things that do not change.

  Alright, now I can finally have a smoke myself. Draw in, as they say, life deeply. Catch my breath.

  No dictaphone, Pavlo Ivanovych told me, no records. And never a mention of him as a source, under any circumstances. That’s what he was taught, back in KGB school, and secret services do not change. It doesn’t matter that this ban makes not a grain of sense—except that it creates extra obstacles for me. I have to find a place to sit—around this corner on Reitarska there’s a cozy little café—and write down, before I forget, the most important parts of what he was so kind as to tell me. Although, the thing of it is, Pavlo Ivanovych cannot tell me what is most important, the thing that’s burning me the most, and where I had most hoped for his help, because he does not know what he is guarding. And none of them who work in that building know—and it doesn’t look like they ever will. No one will ever learn exactly which portions of the Ukrainian archives were taken to Moscow in 1990, and which were burned later, after the declaration of independence—in those fall days of 1991 when we, young and stupid, marched happily along Volodymyrska in front of the no-longer-scary, dark-gray ziggurat and chanted “Shame!” And inside, in the courtyard, people were hard at work—they were burning “material evidence,” covering up their tracks. During the months of September and October, Pavlo Ivanovych said. My dear Pavlo Ivanovych. An old friend of the family. He, dear soul, was one of those who did the burning.

  Who was that clown who once quipped “manuscripts don’t burn”? And somebody else picked it up and now people keep repeating it like they’ve all drunk the purple Kool-Aid—as if precisely to cover up for the burning brigades.

  My legs, of their own volition, carry me toward St. Sophia. Alright, I’ll take a walk; I’ll take a detour—exactly a cigarette’s worth, and then I’ll take Striletska back to Reitarska and come back from the other side. And while I’m at it, I’ll see if the lilacs next to Metropolitan’s Palace have opened already.

  It’s not like I didn’t know that archives were destroyed—no, I’ve known that for a long time, since back when Artem told me. But I had no concept of the scale of this destruction. And all these years, until today, somewhere inside me there lived—of course it lived, how could it not?—a comforting certainty that one of the iron-coated safes on Volodymyrska held the source of those four fat folders knotted with strings that sit in Mom’s attic, like secret minutes from the Molotov-Ribbentrop meetings. And that someday it would all “surface,” as my Pavlo Ivanovych puts it, it would all come to light—the storm in government offices, the criminal renovation of the just-opened Palace Ukraina, the head architect’s suicide, and among all that—the fate of one common fighter for the slaughtered project: engineer Goshchynsky.

  I did really believe this—that it was all out there somewhere, kept safe, sealed, waiting for a volunteer to come one day and dig it up. Doesn’t matter when, even twenty years later. Or thirty, or fifty. I knew I could not become that volunteer—it would hurt too much to read all that. It would be too hard to turn the origins of my life over again—like working wet clay with a shovel… I don’t want to, I do not. Seems like digs like that do require a kind of historical smoke break—to catch one’s breath, to take a one-generation-long detour. Children aren’t much use for this, but grandkids are perfect: Two generations is exactly the right distance, a systole-diastole, a rhythmic breathing, the pulse of progress. It’s enough to know that it’s all basically out there somewhere, waiting for its time. That’s what we’ve been taught, this is the underpinning of all European culture—this firm belief that there are no secrets that won’t sooner or later come to light. Who was it that said it? Jesus? No, Pascal, I think it was… so naïve. But this faith has been nurtured for centuries; it has sprouted its own mythology: the cranes of Ibycus, manuscripts don’t burn. An ontological faith in the fundamental knowability of every human deed. The certainty that, as they now teach journalism majors, you can find everything on the Internet.

  As if the Library of Alexandria never existed. Or the Pogruzhalsky arson, when the whole historical section of the Academy of Sciences’ Public Library, more than six-hundred thousand volumes, including the Central Council archives from 1918, went up in flames. That was in the summer of 1964; Mom was pregnant with me already, and almost for an entire month afterward, as she made her way to work at the Lavra, she would get off the trolleybus when it got close to the university and take the subway the rest of the way: above ground, the stench from the site of the fire made her nauseous. Artem said there were early printed volumes and even chronicles in that section—our entire Middle Ages went up in smoke, almost all of the pre-Muscovite era. The arsonist was convicted after a widely publicized trial, and then was sent to work in Moldova’s State Archives: the war went on. And we comforted ourselves with “manuscripts don’t burn.”

  Oh, but they do burn. And cannot be restored.

  Our entire culture is built on faulty foundations. The history we are taugh
t is nothing but the clamor—increasingly deafening and difficult to disentangle—of voices out-yelling each other: I am! I am! I am! I, so and so, did this and that—and so on, ad infinitum. But the voices resound over burnt-out voids—over the silence of those who’ve been robbed of their chance to cry out, I am! Over those who had their mouths gagged, their throats slashed, their manuscripts burned. We don’t know how to hear their silence; we live as if they never existed. But they did. And their silence, too, is the stuff of which our lives are made.

  Goodbye, Daddy. Forgive me, Daddy.

  A clump of winos with beer at a kiosk, foreign cars parked right on the sidewalk… I turn off onto Georgiiv Lane, which will take me past the baroque Zaborovsky Gate—there’s never anyone going this way.

  In the fall of 1991, they burned “fresh kill”—that is, recent cases, Pavlo Ivanovych said, from the 1970s and ’80s. So there isn’t much left from that period. He told me this as if in anticipation of my unspoken question—even though I came for something completely different and wouldn’t have had the guts to raise this topic anyway: after all, it was Aidy’s, not my, family, that had brought me to Pavlo Ivanovych. I talked about the film, and asked Pavlo Ivanovych to be my expert consultant. With an acknowledgement in the credits and everything. The compensation is modest, but I pay by the hour—just like in Hollywood, yes, sir. I already filed for incorporation—VMOD-Film (VMOD is Vlada-Matusevych-Olena-Dovgan, but no one needs to know that) and sent grant applications to a dozen foundations; I brought the paperwork with me, and was ready to show it to him. I am assembling my team, yes, sir. Starting with him (but he doesn’t need to know this, either). And all for nothing: Aidy’s query went nowhere, Pavlo Ivanovych said. Nothing, they have nothing in their archives. Nothing but their clean hands. And, of course, flaming hearts, as their founder Comrade Dzerzhinsky bequeathed them.

  They don’t even have a complete catalog of their holdings. And how could it be created now, after the black-market trade in archive materials became, in the 1990s, SB employees’ all but main business?

  “One could take practically anything. It’s still not especially hard,” Pavlo Ivanovych added modestly.

  “Yes, I know.” (I’ve taken my share out of certain archives, why should the SBU one be any different?) And, naturally, there were individuals interested in acquiring certain documents. Oh yes, of course. And they were prepared to pay. Yes, of course, I understand. I just kept nodding with an intelligent expression on my face. My long-standing conviction that one day everything would come to light and Tolya Goshchynsky’s truth would not disappear from human memory when I am gone was collapsing noiselessly under the attack of his words, like the Twin Towers on a TV with the sound turned off.

  Nothing, there is nothing. I can go ahead and reassure Aidy: there will never be lustration in this country—there’s nothing left to lustrate. But they built a new facility, well done. A wonderful facility, with high-tech storage areas—climate- and humidity-controlled and full of all kinds of other bells and whistles—to house the archives that, basically, do not exist. A new facility to store the black box with who knows what left in it. Unswept scraps, sacks from the 1930s arrests that never once got opened in the last seventy years. They sat on these sacks of stolen loot for seventy years—well done. Now that there are no living witnesses left, they can start opening them—slowly, one by one, without any rush. There is enough to keep all of them, those who work in this building, busy until they retire, and their successors too. Just imagine how the poor things had to hustle back then, in the fall of 1991, to pull out from this mess whatever had to be burned posthaste!

  “They are the Tenth Bureau,” Pavlo Ivanovych said. “The archive service: select, proven cadres.”

  So, does this mean he was also once a select, proven cadre? And is still proud of that? And Aidy and I thought an archive appointment for a KGB officer was like a mission to Mongolia for a diplomat….

  I was all sincerity and openness. I nodded like a wound-up bunny; I chuckled like an extra at a Comedy Club broadcast. And all for naught: There wasn’t a case with that name, Pavlo Ivanovych asserted, they didn’t find any. They did look, he gave me his officer’s word (apparently, the word of a secret services officer, in his mind, is still worth more than a journalist’s or a businessman’s!)—they looked, but they did not find anything. Dovgan Olena Ambroziivna, born in 1920, was not found among the operational-search case, or among the agents’ files. He is very sorry. He may well be genuinely sorry, and not simply because he’s just lost his chance to appear as a film consultant and to make a buck along the way. He did genuinely want to do something nice for me: I must be one of the very few good deeds in his life, in his entire select and proven service career. His one “onion,” like in Dostoyevsky. Although it’s not like that’s exactly what he was thinking; it must’ve just felt nice, as he looked at me, so pretty, lifted straight from the TV screen and placed into his office, to remember the young, and also so pretty, Olya Goshchynska, whom he had once saved from being blacklisted when it did not cost him anything. It’s nice to feel like a decent man—meaning, translated into the language of Soviet realities, one who, when required to do a despicable thing, did not take initiative.

  So I believe him, my Pavlo Ivanovych. I believe his officer’s word. They did really look and they did not, really, find anything. “But one should not lose hope,” Pavlo Ivanovych said. “It is still possible that the case will one day turn up somewhere.” I didn’t really understand what he meant by that—another perestroika in Russia, perhaps, after which the re-reformed FSB would again open its archives for a short time, or the possibility that the case might be lying in a drawer in one of their senile veterans’ apartments, and would turn up on the black market after said veteran dies? Or on the antique market, why not—didn’t Aidy find Polish love letters from before WWI in a secretary desk once? Manuscripts don’t burn, as everyone knows. A wonderful slogan for the burners’ union.

  “And what does this mean?” I asked.

  “Agent cases were the ones opened for people who were arrested,” Pavlo Ivanovych explained. “Was your, e-er, relative arrested?”

  “No, she died in the resistance. In a battle with a team of”—I almost blurted out “your guys”—“MGB forces.”

  “Well, there you have it,” Pavlo Ivanovych said with satisfaction. “What do you expect?” Stunned by his logic (there’s formal logic, there is female logic, and then there’s the secret services logic—to confuse and befuddle until the opponent loses his or her mind), I couldn’t even react right away.

  “And that other thing, the one you mentioned before, the operational-and-something else, what is that?”

  An operational-search case, Pavlo Ivanovych explained to me as if to a proverbial blonde, is initiated for an object of an operational search.

  “So, there isn’t one of those, either?” I asked, now totally having a blonde moment.

  “No,” Pavlo Ivanovych shrugged. The aging, heart-sore Pavlo Ivanovych with the eyes of an Arab stallion. Or an Arab terrorist.

  You see, I kept at him, worrying him like a limp dick. I just can’t wrap my mind around this—how could a person, because of whom an entire family had been arrested and deported, just disappear from the National Security Bureau’s archives? Her family, after the deportation, was even issued by the MGB a certificate of her death, with the date—November 6, 1947—on it.

  “This means that when she died, the MGB must have at least identified the body and documented it accordingly, doesn’t it? So there must have been some kind of a case, no?”

  “You’re right, this does not add up,” Pavlo Ivanovych agreed. “When did you say this was? Oh, in ’54—well, many things did not add up then. They made quite a mess….” And then he proceeded to tell me, asking me not to mention his name, how the archives were destroyed, in several planned waves, the last of them in the fall of 1991. And the first—in 1954, after Stalin’s death: they freaked out back then too, and rushed
to burn “material evidence.” And an epidemic of suicides swept through the senior leadership back then, too, just like it did in 1991. Pavlo Ivanovych made it sound like a report about natural disasters.

  “So are you telling me that Olena Dovgan’s case may also have been destroyed in 1954, after it was used to produce the certificate of her death for the family?”

  “Anything is possible,” Pavlo Ivanovych agreed.

  “Then, how would you explain this?” I asked, pulling the photograph out of my purse and putting it down before him, as if before a psychic. Or a witch.

  “Is this she?”

  “This is she.”

  “Hm,” Pavlo Ivanovych said, studying the four men and the woman in the UIA uniform with a professional eye, “this is a good picture.” That was not a judgment he made about the aesthetic properties of the photo, its angles or composition—he was assessing its usefulness for operational purposes: the recognizability of the five search objects, lined up and photographed before Pavlo Ivanovych was even born. (Or had he been by then? He is the right age, about sixty, and Mom also said he was born after the war…)

  “Where did you get this photo?” Now, this sounded like an interrogation question.

  “From an archive,” I said honestly, “only not from yours—from an academic institute’s collection. How could it have made it there, how might it have, as you say, turned up?”

  “That’s a good photo,” Pavlo Ivanovych repeated and put it back down.

  “Yes,” I said, getting annoyed by this irrelevant demonstration of his GB professionalism, which includes, among other things, the ability to avoid inconvenient questions, and pointed with my finger at the man who loved Gela. “Look, this one, he even looks a bit like you, really, he does! Too bad this shadow got cast on his face here, but still, there’s something…”

  Pavlo Ivanovych gave me a strange, quick blink: like a condor, not lifting his eyelids—eyes like a pair of jet stones. I blurted out without thinking, “So someone looks like someone else, big deal, the world is full of people who look like each other.” (I’ve even heard this theory that every one of us has at least one living double somewhere else on the planet, a trick of genetics.) And, the weird thing is—under the immovable condor-like, or maybe snake-like gaze of his (the eyes of an Oriental beauty, he’s just a damn Shahrazad, isn’t he?)—something in my mind clicked and revved up: “I’ve seen him somewhere before,” Aidy had said after he went to see Pavlo Ivanovych at the archives that first time, and I laughed then and quoted from The Lost Letter, “Listen, dude, where’d I see you before?” It must be that such an exotic appearance provokes bizarre déjà vu in people all by itself. Mom also said he looked like Omar Sharif, or whatever that actor from back in her day was called, and I would’ve said—Clark Gable from Gone with the Wind, which was not a movie they showed people in Mom’s day, only a Clark Gable adopted for an Oriental taste, as if edited by a Muslim censor to fit a location with palm trees and minarets. Or what if that’s a whole separate type—The Man Whom Everyone Has Seen Somewhere Before, and they need people like that in the secret services too, better to confuse the public?