The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (77 page)

“Cool,” I admit.

Really, that’s quite a technological trick. I think Conan Doyle has a story kind of like that: a locked room, a fixed spot for the victim, and a hole above it where a poisonous snake comes out. Dad doesn’t remember it, but offers to look it up: he’s got Conan Doyle on those shelves, an old Soviet edition.

“Do look it up,” I agree, because now I’m curious, too. I’ll have to tell Lolly tomorrow where these political technologies of the information age take their root. He didn’t have anything to boast about, that Vadym of hers, it’s not like his boys have come up with anything new. Maybe they just can’t come up with anything new period—and that’s why they’re hunting for people like her? Then the Church is right: evil by itself is impotent; its power comes when it co-opts the weak into its service....

Not a groundbreaking insight by any stretch, and, correspondingly, it’s not especially valuable, but for some reason it gives me the same boost of consolation as the smell of the awakened earth from the window a minute ago: I
can think
again! Can think—and not just shuffle endlessly, like a bug in a trash heap, through the causes and consequences of Yulichka’s scheme, with my mind trapped under the pile of lost dollars—an intellectual activity that neither adds to one’s common sense nor makes the world more comprehensible. It’s like my system’s been reloaded: I feel like myself again. Meaning, I feel like the same moron I was before.

And on this wave, as though slightly dumbstruck by relief, I blurt it out in one breath—everything I had no intention of telling him whatsoever, and probably would not have told him in daylight, when things change their proportions—how they tried to recruit my girl today. Without naming names, of course—I’m not that stupid—but most certainly with numbers: twenty-five grand a month; that’s the kind of rates they run these days, Dad.

The TV set in the living room grows quiet, and I can hear in the receiver my father’s heavy breath. Very close, with a slight wheeze: he, too, must be smoking too much.

I don’t often share things like this with him. Back in the day, he was so proud of my accomplishments in physics, so openly glowed with joy when I came home during breaks and sat down in the kitchen to draw for him the scheme of a thermionic generator. And now there’s nothing I could ever do to give him back that fatherly pride. We have both been long and reciprocally silent on the topic of my research career: he no longer asks about the progress of my dissertation—he stopped after the one time I lost it (because his questioning was beginning to sting) and snapped at him in that same kitchen, that I don’t live
my
life to pay him back for what was taken from
his
. He did not say anything to that then, shuffled away to smoke, and I noticed, for the first time, how he shuffled when he walked—like an old man. There are, indeed, things that are better left unsaid. Because Dad would have probably made a good scientist—had he gotten the proper education in his day.

His cognitive apparatus was very much in order—enough for me to get some of it, too. It’s not his fault that when he graduated from high school, he fell into the just-instituted quota for admission of the locals to Lviv’s universities—the notorious “twenty-five percent.” It was the sixties; Khrushchev liberalism was over, and admission committees, especially those at universities “with clearance,” were beginning to take a closer look at the applicants’ bios. No one would open a door into fundamental physics—military research, basically—for a “Bandera spawn.” Dad’s single chance was to go to study in Russia—many did exactly that, and that was
part of the authorities’ plan: that “the Westerners” not admitted at home would leave, dissolve into the mass of the Soviet people, somewhere out there on that sixth of the world’s landmass that made up the geographical Soviet Union. And that was how, little by little, “the fire of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” would be dispersed.

But Dad did not leave. I think Grandma must have exercised her influence. For her, Russia was exile, the waterless echelon, the drunken guards, the rail line you rode for three days without seeing a single village—she and Gramps learned firsthand how such lines were laid: a dead man for every tie. She left her own unborn son somewhere among those dead, and she would not, having come back from there alive herself, hear of sending her oldest child back voluntarily—her son who lived. That’s the way it must have been, I believe, and I never asked about the details.

When it was my turn to take the entrance exams for physics, it was somehow understood that I had to go to Kyiv—as long as it wasn’t Moscow. Only recently, at Lolly’s prompting, have I begun to see our family—first the Dovgans, and then the Vatamanyuks—not as discrete portraits in a family album, as I did before, but as a connected network of links, like the Internet; only recently has it occurred to me that it was actually Dad who drew the lot of paying with his life for the life his parents had had stolen from them. Except that Dad never spoke of it like that, and may never even have thought of it like that—until I ripped into him that time (and I could’ve kept my mouth shut. I’m such a moron; I knew better already!)—and certainly would never stick me with the bill for all of it.

He eventually graduated from the Lviv Polytechnic, where Gramps had also gone—as a distance student, when he was already working at the factory—but a research career was out of his reach at that point. In my own career’s rocket-propelled launch, amidst the ruins of the Soviet system, he must have seen a triumph of historical justice—our family’s conclusive victory over the power
whose mission, for all these years, had been to reduce us to dust, of the gulag or any other variety. He was reborn then, for the first time since Mom died—he was full of plans, even became more tolerant politically, justifying the economic chaos of the early post-independence years, first by the Soviet legacy and then by the lack of any national experience, in the business of self-governance. And even though he found many things about which to boil and rage then also, he generally believed that the country was headed in the right direction. The main thing was—we were free!

My exit into business must’ve come as a serious reality check for him. I don’t know how he learned to live with that, and do not intend to ask him. Ultimately, one learns to live with anything. And if I happen to be bent right now, at three o’clock in the morning, on giving him a synopsis of the lecture on current politics delivered to a famous journalist in a restaurant by an elected member of parliament, it’s not in order to make my old man see the shit around us more clearly or to have him console himself with the fact that his son is not the worst of it. That’s not the thing.

I just like telling him this. I like saying out loud “Daryna says,” like a secret we now share, a family secret: as if with those words, I was drawing a circle of light around all of us together, the three of us (and a golden rectangle falls from our window onto the darkness outside). As if by doing so, I was entrusting Lolly to him—for him to love. For him to be proud of. To be proud, not of the fact that his son in Kyiv lives with a famous journalist but of her, in her own right.

“And that, Dad, is how things are.”

He does have a wheeze in his chest...

“You’ve got to make this public somehow,” he finally responds. “So people will know...”

“How could I make it public? Who’d publish it?” I’m a bit upset to see his thoughts turn elsewhere. “Somewhere on the Internet is all I can think of. But even there, there are already ways to have information buried, with that same money, and you don’t even
need to deal with censorship—just hire a spam brigade and in an hour they’ll pile so much junk over what you posted that it’ll just disappear like a needle in a haystack!”

“If you don’t want anyone to find a letter, put it with all the other letters?” Dad replies. “Wait, that’s from Conan Doyle too! Or Poe?”

“There you go. They haven’t come up with anything new.”

“Then you have to print leaflets!” he determines, as businesslike as if he’d spent his entire life doing just that. “And give them out where there are people—in squares, at stations...”

Actually that’s a thought. Why didn’t I think of that? Of all things, leaflets I can still do. And if I got my boys involved...I could talk to Igor, to Modzalevsky, and Friedman...call Vasylenko, for old times’ sake. They’ve all had it with tax inspection, everyone’s had it with all this shit; the elections were our one hope that things would change, and if they’re wanting to cut off our oxygen on that front too and roll the whole country into concrete...

“We’ll be doing something, Dad.”

For a moment, I feel uplifted. As if the clock were turned back to the days of the Student Brotherhood, the fall of 1990—the university deserted, a note on a classroom door—“Everyone’s gone to the revolution!” our tents on Independence Square—hard to believe, but back then it was still called The October Revolution Square, the self-published leaflets I used to give out at the metro entrance, the run-ins with the cops—the whole of that scorchingly magnificent autumn, like a blast of hot air into my face. Why do we so rarely remember it? For the single reason that our then ringleaders wasted no time selling out to the then Communists and now sit together in the Supreme
Con
-sel?

But we did rouse Kyiv then—we did
put fear into them
, at least enough to make our Communists sign the declaration of secession from the Soviet Union in August of 1991—like hell the Union would’ve fallen apart anyway, even if Ukraine hadn’t split off! We rocked the boat. And in ten months, the sum of the forces we applied worked, broke the course of
history—remember how Kravchuk screamed at us back then, spit flew from his mouth, the day factories went on strike and hundreds of thousands of workers took to the street under our banners: “I’m not afraid of God or the Devil, and I won’t be scared of you!” Never mind that scaring him could not be further from our minds back then; we were just thrilled to see our little pebble start an avalanche—and now some fat-ass will tell me that it was all his oil that did it?

I don’t know how Lolly managed to hold her tongue; she was there, too, in October of 1990. We were probably standing just feet apart from each other in the same crowd.

“Darynka asleep already?” Dad asks, as if hearing my thoughts.

“She is.”

He’s never called her Darynka before.

“Burning the midnight oil, are you?”

“Yeah, a little bit. Had a lot of work today.”

“That’s good,” he concludes, not paying attention. And adds, with a belated explosion of surprise, “But gosh darn it, how could people turn rotten so easily?”

“Easier than you think,” I say, with great conviction thinking of Yulichka again (damn her!). “If it were only the politicians! Daryna says there’s no one left from their echelon—every colleague she could vouch for is no longer in business.”

“Keep her safe,” Dad suddenly says. “You keep Daryna safe.”

Whoa.

I am mute as an ox suddenly. And completely lost; I don’t imagine he means that Lolly is in any kind of danger: Dad’s not one to panic and not an alarmist. He was the one who taught me, when I reached the age of street fights, never to threaten anyone, that only the losers threaten, but you must be ready to strike if someone messes with you, and if you can learn to keep this readiness turned on inside you at all times, no one will mess with you—lessons he carried with him out of his street-gang Karaganda childhood and for which I will be grateful as long as I live. And only after a moment or two, does it come to me, so simple it sends a chill
down my spine: it was Mom he was thinking about! The one he loved—and whom he, as he sees it, failed to keep safe.

What if it’s always like that: When one spouse dies, it’s always the other’s fault? The one who survived somehow didn’t hold on to the other—let them slip.

You don’t understand squat about your own father until you meet the woman with whom you want to have children. It has never occurred to me before that he might feel guilty for Mom’s death. But right then, he said it as if he were asking forgiveness: keep her safe. Keep her, once you’ve found her, don’t let her slip away, because there’s nothing worse if you do...

To hell with how late it is, this is a solemn moment—there aren’t many like this between us, and perhaps you don’t need many in your entire life—better to appreciate
the gold they bear
. And only now that Dad and I have become equals, now that he has finally put
my love
next to his own in a private hierarchy, do I feel a terrible sadness for Mom. Not that I miss her, but that I feel a sadness
for her
—for the mysterious girl who remained in the photographs and whom my memory, shredded into fragments, can no longer assemble into a whole: a funny biscuit-shaped chignon on her head, as was the fashion at the time, a headscarf tied coquettishly over it, in track pants, carrying a humongous—how did she ever manage it?—backpack (and she carried me, too, just like that, an extra twenty pounds attached to her only in the front like a backpack she couldn’t take off—we do put women through all kinds of hell). And everywhere, in every pose she had the same poignant gracefulness of
an accelerating
motion interrupted, the ominously unfinished elegance of a sharpened pencil or a flying arrow: when the precision of the lines determines the vanishing point without deviation, and if the vanishing point cannot be seen, the impression left is unsettling, anxious. Where was this girl always running, aimed so intently? (What did she come for, why did she leave so quickly—never having lived to her intended vanishing point?)

And she was always running—she chased after something all her life, didn’t settle down even after she became a mother, as happens to most romantic girls. Well, at least it taught me at an early age that I’d never replace the entire world for any woman.... The Plast scouts were banned back then; Mom, being an alpinist, went hiking and took climbing groups to the mountains for sport. She used to say to Granny Lina that in the mountains one is closer to God, and that before every expedition she’d dream the exact position of stars above her future campsite. She also sang in a choir that eventually got disbanded for “religious propaganda”—they sang carols—and knew by heart what seemed like everything Lesya Ukrainka ever wrote, “Oh, for that body do not sigh.” How was she supposed to live with all that in the hopelessness of the Soviet seventies? A heartrending, incomprehensible life dropped, as if from a cliff into an abyss, into an utterly inanimate time—like a bird that’d flown in through the wrong window.