The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (85 page)

“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?

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.