The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (86 page)

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?