The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  I throw the window open and suck the prickly night air into my nostrils. I may be losing it to insomnia, but for one instant, I clearly catch the moist smell of the animate earth—a sign that it has already awakened, that somewhere in its depths juices are brewing, running, getting ready to shoot up tree trunks… the first sign of spring.

  Gosh, it’s quiet out there. Not a single window lit in the whole neighborhood.

  I put on the electric kettle. And pick up the phone.

  One, two, three beeps… on the fourth one, the receiver comes to life—see, I knew the old man wouldn’t be sleeping!

  “Hullo?” He sounds stern, displeased—who’s this loser calling in the middle of the night?

  “Hi, Dad.”

  I can hear the TV murmuring indistinctly in the background and can picture my father as if he were in front of me—standing in the hallway of our tiny Lviv flat (the phone’s in the hallway, the TV in the living room), in his broken-in felt loafers with the heels folded in, the bookshelves behind his back packed with old magazines he can’t bring himself to throw out, and above his head—heck, I forgot what’s up there—a coat rack?

  “Oh, it’s you,” my father says. “Howdy.”

  As if I weren’t four hundred miles away but just walked through his door, the way I did when I was fifteen. I took my shoes off in the dark, tiptoed in my socks through the hallway… and froze at the kitchen door. Dad was sitting at the table with the nightlight on, reading—it was obvious he had not gone to bed at all. Howdy, was all he grumbled at me—and went back to his book, a bit embarrassed even: as if each of us had gotten caught in the middle of something he did not want the other to see. (I was in love with a girl, my first love; I think he’d guessed as much….) And now he is also working hard not to show how happy it makes him to hear my voice—he can’t show he is dependent on me in any way at all. Only now, when he is over sixty, and he’s got high blood pressure, diabetes, and podagra, his reticence has a completely different meaning. For the second time tonight, I feel my throat catch.

  “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  “You wish,” he protests vigorously. “You know I don’t go to bed so early.”

  Early is before three in the morning. He won’t fall asleep until it’s begging on dawn, and might sleep three or four hours. He does not call this insomnia; he still puts on a tough show, loath to admit any old-age ailments, pretending that this is just the schedule he’s set for himself: he is a busy man, works until late, and spends his nights after work assembling the family archive (Lolly’s idea). Plus, he is very engaged with politics, naturally, like all people who are growing old alone.

  “I was just watching Channel Five…”

  Recently, this channel, propped up by the opposition in the run-up to the election, has become for Dad what Radio Liberty used to be in the Soviet days.

  “Have you heard what these goons are up to in Mukachevo?” And in the same breath, he spills into my lap everything he’s just heard on the TV (which meanwhile goes on muttering in the background, the effect of which is a surreal experience of something like simultaneous interpretation), about how in Mukachevo the powers that be are calling a special election, to replace the current mayor with their own puppet. I’m left making sparse grunts to evince my continued attention, not showing that I have heard all this before—and more than once. About the Carpathian forests, cut down by “those goons,” and that the catastrophic floods that wreak havoc on Transcarpathia every year are nothing but a natural consequence of their criminal lumbering, and how the current mayor, who was determined to reel “those goons” in a bit, was prevented from even running in these elections by having his paperwork stolen, and now the quiet resort town of Mukachevo is suddenly swarming with packs of homicidal-looking men in leather jackets—they’re being brought in by busloads, from who knows where, they stroll around the town like they own it, make trouble in its bars and restaurants, and intimidate the locals, so that folks are too scared to go out after dark anymore; it’s terrorism, pure terrorism, and the indignity makes my dad younger, as if in the course of speaking to me he’s lost about thirty years.

  “What do they think they’re doing, bringing back the Stalin days? That’s plain the way the Soviets used to run their elections in ’48! Bring a garrison to every village, herd folks to the ballot box with Kalashnikovs. Some folks still thought it’d work the way it did with the Poles: if we boycott the elections, they won’t be legitimate. That was before they figured how this new power does business.”

  The kettle, as if heated with the fire of Dad’s speech, bubbles up indignantly. I can’t help smiling. He doesn’t know this, of course, but Dad is mimicking me—an hour ago I was raising hell just like that in front of Lolly. She’s right when she says that when I grow old I’ll be “a carbon copy of Ambroziy Ivanovych.” Been a while since I last called. I’ve been busy. Been even longer since I last went to Lviv…

  “This, Dad, is what they now call electoral technologies.”

  I pour boiling water into my mug.

  There will come a day when I can no longer just dial a number like this, day or night, and hear my father’s voice. For a moment, this future void gapes before me, as if someone snatched away my blanket while I was sleeping, and left me exposed to the cold. I get up to shut the window, while Dad—alive and well for now, thank God—continues to expose the 1948 vintage of Russian electoral technologies.

  “You know what else they did? As your gramps used to tell it, they’d bore a little hole in the booth’s ceiling right above the spot where the chemical pencil lay tied, and let a stream of chalk dust pour from that hole the entire time. When a man came into a booth and bent to lick the pencil to put whatever in the ballot, that little stream of white dust would land right atop his head. And it’s winter, February, everyone’s wearing hats… stepped into the booths with their hats on, too. The booths are private, as they’re supposed to be—no one can see anything, vote however you please! Cross that one candidate out if you please, or put a clean ballot into the box: It’s a free country! Guaranteed by Comrade Stalin’s constitution. And on the way out, everyone who had white on their hats—the ones who put the pencils to use—got snatched onto a truck that stood ready in the backyard, and went to build Communism in the tundra. That’s the kind of elections we used to have, kid.”

  “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 t
o 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 n
ot 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.”