The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  Yes, even though Daddy tried to convince her that musical performance is a profession without any prospects whatsoever and wanted her to go to law school. But Daddy is musical himself; he has perfect pitch and still sings sometimes in good company—he naturally has a wonderful tenor, Nika asserts so fervently as if it made all the difference in the world to me. As if I had visited her dad for the express purpose of assessing his natural vocal abilities. Now it is my turn—I recognize these notes in Nika’s voice with unerring precision, I can’t be fooled: Nika is making excuses, she is ashamed of her father’s profession—she would much rather see him an opera tenor, even of the second or third roster. Really, how did I not think of this before: at the time of her childhood, in the ’80s—and even of mine, in the ’70s—the acronym Kay-Gee-Bee spoken out loud was already likely to elicit from other kids the same snickering as names of certain hidden parts of the human body, so standing up and announcing to the whole class where her daddy worked could not have added to little Nika Boozerova’s popularity among her peers. It wasn’t all that cloudless, then, her childhood....

  “Your father’s trepidation can be understood.” I smile at her maternally. “Art is an uncertain business; only a few make their way to success, and law school at least guarantees a living. Especially when, like in your family, it’s a legacy...”

  To this mention of family legacy Nika darkens and bites her lip—it must be a nervous habit she has, because her front teeth have traces of the lipstick she’s swallowed.

  “Well, not really...Daddy, when he was young, wanted to take the entrance exams to Mechanics and Mathematics, he was really good at math, but Gramps didn’t let him. And the musical talent—that comes with the Jewish blood...”

  Jewish?

  At first, I don’t know what to say: Nika and I truly belong to different generations—the freedom with which she speaks of her Jewishness can serve as a line of demarcation for an entire era. Among my peers, being Jewish was still a mark, something profoundly ambivalent and vaguely shameful, something even those with last names ending in -man and -stein were loath to admit to, and half-bloods hid like syphilis under the covers of their Slavic last names. And there was no game better loved by KGB-paid informants than teasing a Jewish grandma’s grandson with anti-Semitic innuendo and watching him go pale, change in the face and chuckle along stoically like the Spartan boy with a fox cub chewing at his stomach—the other extreme from the opposite camp was an urgent, tentative, roundabout confession, to everyone suspected of being Jewish, of one’s own Judophilia and love for the state of Israel (about which at the time absolutely nothing was known but which was loved anyway, long-distance, purely for the fact that it was not loved by Moscow).

  And in my student years, I often said such things myself—feeling, however, every time, a slight awkwardness at this forced demonstration of basic human solidarity, like the feeling one gets from demonstrating one’s health at a gynecological exam. To Jewish people, I think this must have been as offensive as any anti-Semitic barb. But the problem, as Aidy says, did not have a solution within the framework of that system and instead took care of itself later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when I simply stopped noticing who was Jewish and who was not, and what kind of Jewish they were, and who was whose grandma’s sister’s husband, and have internalized this not noticing so deeply, it would appear, that I now stand before Nika Boozerova feeling like the world’s biggest idiot for the second time in five minutes: oh, so they are Jews!

  So that’s where Pavlo Ivanovych gets his Arab look, his near-Eastern charm, some of which, in a diluted form, has trickled down to his progeny—and when Nika turns her head, the magnificent prominent eyes, the tucked-up nose, and the plump-lipped mouth assemble instantly, like a 3-D image behind a stereoscopic picture, into a new kind of person: a Jewish girl, a mixed-blood—and what a comely mix it is!

  “So, your grandmother must have been Jewish then?” I ask, now with genuine curiosity: this must mean that Gramps Boozerov managed to get married before 1937, before the great Jewish purges of the Party and NKVD. Afterward, Jewish wives were no longer fashionable among the fighters of banditism, and after the war, when they went after the Jews almost as zealously as in prewar Germany, a wife like that was a downright liability.

  Something makes the girl hesitate before she answers, the expression on her cute face the same as her father’s when he avoids giving a direct answer. The whole situation strikes me as pretty stupid: here we are, standing in the middle of the street, lined up against St. Sofia’s wall, investigating the genealogy of Veronika Boozerova’s musical talent! But no, there’s something else going on, a different story that involves me, too: back in the ’70s, when Pavlo Ivanovych curated Mom’s museum, they didn’t suffer Jews in the security services, not even half-bloods—by then the USSR was fighting Zionism, and those few-and-far-between Jews who remained in the corps had to have been so select and proven that they wouldn’t cast a shadow at sundown—men like that would sell their own mothers to keep their positions, never mind some Olya Goshchynska, and Pavlo Ivanovych doesn’t fit the type, something’s not right here.... And Nika, although a product of a different epoch, also backpedals, tries to take her Jewish grandmother back, awkwardly, like a child pulling back her doll.

  “Well, I don’t really know for sure...probably...Gramps died before I was born, and Grandma didn’t know either. They were pure Russians themselves, born and raised, from somewhere near Kuybyshev...Samara, as it’s now called.”

  “Oh,” I say, totally lost now.

  “Only we’re not related,” Nika says. “They adopted Dad from an orphanage.”

  Mowgli bursts in my mind, like a bubble, the spur of the old guess cutting in again. “Your matinka still alive?”—“And well, thank you, and yours?” Oh God...how he recoiled—so obviously!—when I shot it back at him, so casually, back then, when we first met...Mowgli, an orphan, so that’s what it was, who’d have thought?

  “Oh,” I repeat, as if dazed. “I see.”

  Well, at least I—owing to Pavlo Ivanovych—was spared a similar fate...

  “What if we took a little walk, Nika? I was about to go into the grounds, see if the lilacs have opened...”

  Nika, instantly relieved, happily trots beside me, hanging devotedly on to my every word—now she’ll tell me anything I want and will go on for as long as I want. Along Striletska, the puddles spread resplendent as lakes and pigeons totter across them in pursuit of females, cooing just like Nika into my ear. I’m getting a bit lightheaded.

  “Daddy was adopted from an orphanage in Lviv when Gramps worked there”—I decided not to seek Nika’s clarification of the exact nature of Gramps’s work there—“Daddy does not remember his biological parents, he was too little.

  “He doesn’t even remember Lviv, he grew up a Kyivite—the Boozerovs were given an apartment in Kyiv when Gramps was discharged. In the heart of downtown, not far from here, on Malopidvalna, it’s now worth half a million dollars,” Nika brags—she doesn’t really care what she is talking about as long as it’s about her: she is showing me her life like her school report full of As;, she is playing her capstone concert for me alone, with a single piece on the program—The Boozerovs. From the top, one more time, please, Nika—one and two and...on Malopidvalna?

  “How convenient, that’s really close to work for your father, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Grandma said that she wanted to move to Crimea, to the south shore, to Yalta or Simeiz—the Boozerovs could choose. Crimea was just being resettled at the time, but Gramps picked Kyiv. That was after the war, in ’48. In Stalin’s times,” Nika clarifies.

  Yes, I understand. Her biological grandparents—the ones Daddy doesn’t remember—a Lviv Jewish couple, most likely, fell victim to repressions. And, most likely, they were executed, because had the mother still been alive, no one would have taken an infant from her—Nika’s familiarity with contemporary penitentiary procedures is also a legacy, although she is not
aware of it.

  Nika always feels like Lviv is her native city; she’s felt it since the first time she set foot there, back when she first went there on a school-group tour. She felt as if she had lived there before. Now she’ll start telling me how much she loves Lviv; I bet this number of hers plays especially wells with boys—even in the Soviet days, Lviv was our last symbol of Europeanness, and today the admiration of Lviv coffee and what’s left of its Renaissance architecture is a bona fide prerequisite for all intellectually ambitious boys and girls.

  So, that’s who Nika would like to be—a Lvivite with a pedigree, and one and two and...stop, stop, let’s go again from the beginning: it’s 1948—how could there be any Lviv Jews left? There were still those who hadn’t managed to escape to Poland, Nika explains. But the Lviv Jews were wiped out by the Germans, back in the ghetto, during the war, and when, did she say, was her daddy born? January of ’48? So how?

  “Well, many of them returned later, in the Soviet times already,” Nika says lightheartedly—many of those who had fled at the beginning of the war. Well, okay, that could be, all kinds of things were known to happen—must have been a couple of poor souls with pro-Communist ideas, and that was their undoing.

  As far as I’m concerned, let her have her Lviv Jews if she wants. “And the Jews, you know, they’re all musical,” Nika repeats with an unsophisticated and totally goyish proclivity for superficial generalizations. Well, certainly not all of them? Doesn’t matter, she and her daddy got their musical gifts from the Jewish side, Nika insists—on her mom’s side of the family everyone’s tone-deaf, not one of them has any ear-to-voice coordination. Is that so, well, then, of course.

  Her daddy, Nika coos melodically, in tune with the pigeons, had actually suspected he was adopted ever since he was little, because older boys in the yard had often mocked him as a little Yid. Really, what a keen phenotypic observation for a child to make. Nika nods, missing my irony—“Grandma Dunya, actually, was also a brown-eyed brunette, but she looked different; they had Tatars in their family...”

  In a fit of generosity, Nika is ready to throw in Grandma Dunya as a bonus, but I delicately steer the kid back a couple measures: and one and two and...“And how did you find out for certain?”

  “And for certain,” (Nika repeats this phrase with visible gusto, it must be new to her in Ukrainian and now she’ll trot it out whether it’s called for or not) “for certain Daddy learned when he was an adult already, in his thirties. Sometime around then. Someone at work, who envied him—because Daddy was moving up quickly and many envied him—wrote a complaint to the higher-ups alleging that he had relatives in Israel. This made quite a stir,” (her speech more and more wiggles free of the school textbook’s manacles) “for a while there it looked like Daddy would get fired.” Oh, I can certainly imagine that, I remember those times. Yep, so they were running background checks on him and stuff like that—Nika gives her shoulder a disgusted jerk, as she walks, as if to shake off stuff like that, and bites her lower lip again: a very sexy little mannerism she’s got. “Fortunately, Gramps was still alive then, and went to the appropriate offices and set the record straight. And for Daddy, too, while he was at it.”

  “And Pavlo Ivanovych,” now it feels sort of weird to say his name like this, knowing that he is not Ivanovych at all, and maybe not even a Pavlo: the name, gray as a KGB suit, is instantly stripped of its living bearer, and becomes a handle one hesitates to repeat, like something indecent. “Did Pavlo Ivanovych ever try to find his biological parents?”

  “Oh no!” Nika is shocked by my ignorance. “How could he?”

  “Well, of course, but I don’t mean back in the day, in the Soviet times...now, after the independence; he could’ve done it, couldn’t he? Especially since he works in the archives...if they really fell victim to the repressions in ’48, there might be a record, a trace?”

  “But what’s the point?” Nika objects sensibly, clearly rehearsing the arguments she’s heard from someone else—from the adults. “They are not alive anyway; if they’d survived, they would’ve found him at some point in the last fifty years. People who came back from the gulag—they looked for their children...”

  But no one looked for Boozerov. So there wasn’t anyone left to look. And if they had found him? Would it have made Pavlo Ivanovych, a KGB officer, happy?

  “And those relatives in Israel—is that true, or...?”

  “Oh please!” Nika snorts. “They just made it up to derail Daddy’s career. What relatives could there be if we don’t even know the last name he had when his biological parents surrendered him?”

  This strikes me as strange, but I know very little about orphanages; I’ve only made one show on this topic—the one about that village priest who adopted a few dozen homeless children, and those weren’t cute and black-eyed like the baby the Boozerovs must have chosen one day—like a shiny tchotchke in a store window—but ones that truly no one else wanted, defective ones, born with handicaps. But this was in an independent Ukraine already, and who knows what kind of laws they had back in the USSR; I haven’t researched that, so I better not say anything.

  Nika and I turn the corner onto Rylsky Lane and walk past the windows of Kyiv’s most expensive boutiques, under the eyes of bored security guards who stir to life when they see us—just enough to follow us with their eyes—the two women, one older and the other younger, one slim and the other plump—and decide which one they like better—the same way I use my eyes like fingers to feel out each pebble of leather on the purses in the window displays as I walk by (even the cheapest of them costs a third of my former salary!). And under the leers of this sleepy fight club that’s pulled itself outside for a gulp of fresh ozone, Nika, a true straight-A student, instinctively straightens up, pulls her stomach in, and reaches to her temple to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear...looks like she’s still a virgin, or at least really inexperienced. An obedient, diligent child, and that’s the way she’ll be in bed, too: tell me what I should do, and I’ll be the best at it.

  It’s what they told her, I think to myself, vaguely—she hasn’t decided anything for herself yet. She is still stuffed full of what the adults have packed into her, and it’s Daddy who told her, Daddy has decided for her: the child doesn’t need her biography burdened with some lost-without-a-trace Jewish grandmother. Or a grandfather, or whoever it was, so biblically ox-eyed. And at some basic level, one can understand Daddy’s decision—when one remembers how thick the miasma of anti-Semitism was within those walls on Volodymyrska: that was the atmosphere that shaped him, and it must have been the same in the home where he grew up.

  Gramps Boozerov, if he was a captain by the end of the war, must have been shipped in from someplace near Samara right at the peak of the purging of the Jewish elements, and from that point the orders stayed the same until 1991, so Nika could not fail to inhale some of that miasma herself. That’s probably why the possible relatives in Israel hold no appeal for her; it’s no asset. An exotic Lviv backstory—now, that’s different: for now, it’s just an ornament, body glitter that gives her extra charm in the company of her peers, but later, if her musical career takes off, she’ll be able to put her lost-in-the-depths-of-the-gulag, Polish-Jewish ancestors to much better use, and better yet, because they are unknown, she could claim whatever pedigree she wishes—she could hint, perhaps, to a Western impresario, at possibly being related to Arthur Rubinstein, or any other famous musician who might have been a Polish Jew. It’s an inexhaustible resource! She could choose from thousands of lives that were slashed short, just as Gramps Boozerov could choose from any one of someone else’s suits in the wardrobes of Lviv’s emptied apartments, any one of someone else’s cities, homes, and even children—could choose someone’s life, already made, and wear it as his own. She wouldn’t even need to hire promoters or convert journalists to her cause: Jewish ancestors, vanished without a trace in Lviv under Stalin’s rule, are ready capital. You just have to know how to collect your dividend
s. I could clue her in right now (she herself, of course, hasn’t thought about it yet)—I could tell her about all kinds of our movers and shakers who are doing very well for themselves in the West peddling their freshly pressed Jewish pedigrees, the way Russian White Guard emigrants used to sell their estates, supposedly left behind in the old country, to the gullible French, and every Georgian in the camps was called a Count.

  This must be the natural course of things: it is not the antiquarians or museum curators, but swindlers and profiteers who are first to descend upon the ruins, and they are the surest sign that life, as Vadym preached to me, goes on.

  It’s stupid, but I sort of resent Nika for her biological grandparents—for her not having gotten curious about them, not having made her dad untie a few of those dust-covered archival bags. It’s stupid, she is still so young—her life still revolves around herself. She isn’t even quite comfortable in her own body yet; she hasn’t grown out of the phase where one fits oneself into the ready TV-and movie-supplied molds—she does not know yet what she’s had taken away from her, does not feel the emptiness where the amputated part used to be. And her confessions make me feel ill at ease, as though she were brandishing at me a poorly set, naked stump of a limb—and was completely ignorant of the fact that it was not her arm.

  “When did your daddy tell you? Did you know already?”

  We have reached the square in front of the Bohdan Khmelnitsky monument, and Nika lowers her eyes, focusing on the granite squares under her feet as if contemplating a game of hopscotch.

  “It wasn’t Daddy who told me; Mom did...Daddy told me later, after Grandma Dunya died...”

  She is evading again, the question is uncomfortable—and, adapting to her, because she is now slipping from my grip, I unwittingly adjust my step, too, and also try not to step on the cracks between the stones that pave the way to St. Sofia’s gate. No stepping, as it was called in hopscotch—it’s incredible how your body recalls—in a blink—these long-buried childhood skills: the way, on your walk home from school with the backpack on your shoulders, you hop from square to square, without stepping, and the stone squares are wide, so you have to make one big hop first and then, skipping, two little ones, ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three.... And all of a sudden, Nika’s youth, with all its unspent reserve of energy, engulfs me in a searing, apple-crisp wave, the near flame of her immortal girlhood knocks the air out of me, this effervescent ripeness of hers that could burst at any moment into a leap, a laugh, a chase, a game—a revelation. This is the reason people have children, darts through my mind, with them, you live through all this one more time, and nothing can replace it! How much older than her am I, nineteen, twenty years? If I hadn’t kept safe with Sergiy back in the day, I could have had a girl like this too—or a boy—no, a girl’s better....