The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  In any case, I wasn’t taunting Pavlo Ivanovych, as he seemed to think—I simply pointed out an obvious thing that ought to have flattered him: his face does look a little like that sad-eyed handsome man’s in the picture—the man from my dream, the one Aidy suspects to be his mysterious namesake who passed through his family’s lives like a stunt-double in a movie, never having identified himself (an “Ad. Or.” Aidy says, although I countered right away that he can’t be his namesake because “Or.” has got to mean “Orest,” and only later wondered if perhaps I said that because of the movie White Bird Marked with Black, in which the young Bogdan Stupka, for the first time in the history of Soviet cinematography, played a Bandera follower who was not a caricature, and was named Orest).

  But Pavlo Ivanovych, apparently, was not in the least bit flattered by this comparison because he informed me, rather sternly, that his father served in that area—and precisely in the “anti-banditism” department, how about that? I felt my jaw drop. And his father was even severely wounded in battle; it was a miracle he survived. “Oh,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “He remained an invalid for the rest of his life,” Pavlo Ivanovych lamented. I went ahead and made a sorrowful face, too, feeling like it was now he who was taunting me: it was my father who had been made an invalid, and not without the help of the very agency in which the Boozerov dynasty so distinguished itself. And since we’re on the subject of fighting “banditism”—it was my father who went to war against it barehanded and never came back—against banditism without quotation marks, the one that had taken over half the world: enthroned, institutionalized, ruling. And here was Pavlo Ivanovych seemingly stacking our parents’ fates in the same file, seemingly saying we should be friends: the two invalid-father orphans, hello, Mowgli, we be of one blood, ye and I….

  I asked if Boozerov Senior still lived. “No, he died in ’81.” And again I felt as if Pavlo Ivanovych expected me to say back to him, oh, and my father passed in ’98. As if he were purposefully challenging me to turn the conversation to my father, something he didn’t dare do himself, challenging me to a game with incomprehensible rules, like the Easter Day knocking of one painted egg against another, to see whose father is stronger… but I said nothing. My exploded faith in the ontological indestructibility of every truth stuck out of me in all directions, charred steel, and the site of destruction was cordoned off with yellow police tape: Ground Zero, do not cross. And afterward, for some reason, I felt sorry for him—my self-appointed Mowgli, Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov. The invalid-father orphan.

  I toss the cigarette stub into a puddle, to the great ire of a flock of sparrows (such tiny little nuggets—and what a ruckus!). I come up on the Zaborovsky Gate, to which they don’t bring the tourists, bricked shut for three centuries already—with its wildly curled baroque frieze and a colonnade sunk into the surrounding wall. Across the street is an oncology hospital; its patients enjoy a view that’s perfect for the contemplation of the eternal: a sealed gate, No Exit. Abandon hope.

  I do wish Aidy weren’t in a meeting right now.

  Should I call my mother, perhaps? No, it’ll take forever to tell her everything, and it’s not the kind of conversation one has on the street anyway. Pavlo Ivanovych did not neglect to send his greetings this time either, even asked me if she still worked in the Lavra, the Museum of Cinematography. “No, she is retired.” “Really?”—Pavlo Ivanovych was surprised: in his mind, he must have fixed Mom as a younger woman. Must have fixed her the way she looked, and not by her date of birth, from the file. He must have really liked her. She got lucky. And, by extension, so did I.

  It’s only Dad who didn’t have any luck. That’s just how it worked—he didn’t get lucky, and that’s that. Actually, if you think about it, Pavlo Ivanovych’s telling me about his invalid father was a sort of underhanded apology—peace, what can you do, that’s how the cookie crumbles. Some get lucky, others don’t. Let bygones be bygones, and we’ll now be like peas and carrots. I really have no complaints about Pavlo Ivanovych personally—quite the opposite. There’s something likeable about him. Something even vulnerable, in its way.

  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?”