The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (84 page)

And only on the path from the parking lot to the porch does he notice that she is carrying a white plastic bag bulging with the edges of a canvas rectangle wrapped in several layers of newspaper.

“Oh no.” She shakes her head when she sees him looking at it, and smiles, a bit sheepishly this time. “Say what you want, but I’m not leaving it in a car again.”

A
nd just like that, it’s spring outside!

The sun blasts from everywhere, like an orchestra that’s been waiting, bows poised, for me to emerge from the SBU archive as its signal to launch into a thunderous fanfare—a moist glow with a little blue mixed into it blazes from every crack, every gap between the buildings, and every puddle on the asphalt, and the asphalt along Zolotovoritska gleams like a freshly bathed seal’s back: while I was having my audience with Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov, the world got rained on! Wet tree trunks drip with sweat like the bodies of happy lovers, a whole new stream sprouts cheerily out of a downspout, and the faces of passersby—who had been looking increasingly oppressed and gloomy of late, as though the imminent elections were bringing with them a front of oppressive air into the city—have acquired the silly and joyful expression of those missionaries who call out the good news about Christ in courtyards, in Russian with an American accent, without a clue that they’re about twelve centuries late bringing this news to us; and new grass is so vigorously bright on the lawns it makes you want to turn into a rabbit and hop over to nibble it, and the buds on the trees have been instantly transformed into a visible stubble, into that translucent goldenish mist that envelops the trees in a gentle glimmer like the fuzz on a newborn’s head. Life does, yes, it does have its bright side—as, for example, in Kyiv, in April after a thunderstorm! How did I not hear it roll in? It must’ve come down in torrents—the puddles are still rimmed in white foam—I heard absolutely nothing...it’s totally soundproof in there, like a dungeon.

And it is a dungeon, that archive of theirs. Artificial lights, eternal dusk. Coming out feels like breaking free from a bomb shelter.

Two characters, clearly from the same building, smoking on the sidewalk, look up as one and follow me with their eyes. They might be from a different building, too; there’s some sort of a bank next door. Bank employees have the same eyes as the rank and file of secret services. And the same manner: false friendliness and a cold secretiveness. They all looked at me that way—everyone we passed as Pavlo Ivanovych escorted me out: down a hallway, up the stairs, another hallway, another set of stairs, all the way to the check-in turnstile. Return your pass, please. Of course, or else, God forbid, I’d keep it for myself and then what? The signature of the SBU check-in lady on that pathetic piece of paper would be acquired by foreign intelligence agencies?

There are things that do not change. Names of countries, monuments, language, money, uniforms, military commands, even ways of waging war—these all change. But secret services do not, they are always the same. Always and everywhere, in every country. One out of every six men convicted in the USSR after the war for working in the Nazi police had been an NKVD employee before the war. Had it been, by some bizarre set of circumstances, the American and not the German army that invaded the Soviet Union back then, these men would’ve gone to serve the American democracy—and the American democracy would’ve been just as happy to have them. Because there are things that do not change.

Alright, now I can finally have a smoke myself. Draw in, as they say, life deeply. Catch my breath.

No dictaphone, Pavlo Ivanovych told me, no records. And never a mention of him as a source, under any circumstances. That’s what he was taught, back in KGB school, and secret services do not change. It doesn’t matter that this ban makes not a grain of sense—except that it creates extra obstacles for me. I have to find a place to sit—around this corner on Reitarska there’s a cozy little café—and write down, before I forget, the most important parts of what he was so kind as to tell me. Although, the thing of it is, Pavlo Ivanovych cannot tell me what is most important, the thing that’s burning me the most, and where I had most hoped for his
help, because he does not know what he is guarding. And none of them who work in that building know—and it doesn’t look like they ever will. No one will ever learn exactly which portions of the Ukrainian archives were taken to Moscow in 1990, and which were burned later, after the declaration of independence—in those fall days of 1991 when we, young and stupid, marched happily along Volodymyrska in front of the no-longer-scary, dark-gray ziggurat and chanted “Shame!” And inside, in the courtyard, people were hard at work—they were burning “material evidence,” covering up their tracks. During the months of September and October, Pavlo Ivanovych said. My dear Pavlo Ivanovych. An old friend of the family. He, dear soul, was one of those who did the burning.

Who was that clown who once quipped “manuscripts don’t burn”? And somebody else picked it up and now people keep repeating it like they’ve all drunk the purple Kool-Aid—as if precisely to cover up for the burning brigades.

My legs, of their own volition, carry me toward St. Sophia. Alright, I’ll take a walk; I’ll take a detour—exactly a cigarette’s worth, and then I’ll take Striletska back to Reitarska and come back from the other side. And while I’m at it, I’ll see if the lilacs next to Metropolitan’s Palace have opened already.

It’s not like I didn’t know that archives were destroyed—no, I’ve known that for a long time, since back when Artem told me. But I had no concept of the scale of this destruction. And all these years, until today, somewhere inside me there lived—of course it lived, how could it not?—a comforting certainty that one of the iron-coated safes on Volodymyrska held
the source
of those four fat folders knotted with strings that sit in Mom’s attic, like secret minutes from the Molotov-Ribbentrop meetings. And that someday it would all “surface,” as my Pavlo Ivanovych puts it, it would all come to light—the storm in government offices, the criminal renovation of the just-opened Palace Ukraina, the head architect’s suicide, and among all that—the fate of one common fighter for the slaughtered project: engineer Goshchynsky.

I did really believe this—that it was all out there somewhere, kept safe, sealed, waiting for a volunteer to come one day and dig it up. Doesn’t matter when, even twenty years later. Or thirty, or fifty. I knew I could not become that volunteer—it would hurt too much to read all that. It would be too hard to turn the origins of my life over again—like working wet clay with a shovel...I don’t want to, I do not. Seems like digs like that do require a kind of historical smoke break—to catch one’s breath, to take a one-generation-long detour. Children aren’t much use for this, but grandkids are perfect: Two generations is exactly the right distance, a systole-diastole, a rhythmic breathing, the pulse of progress. It’s enough to know that it’s all basically out there somewhere, waiting for its time. That’s what we’ve been taught, this is the underpinning of all European culture—this firm belief that there are no secrets that won’t sooner or later come to light. Who was it that said it? Jesus? No, Pascal, I think it was...so naïve. But this faith has been nurtured for centuries; it has sprouted its own mythology: the cranes of Ibycus, manuscripts don’t burn. An ontological faith in the fundamental knowability of every human deed. The certainty that, as they now teach journalism majors, you can find everything on the Internet.

As if the Library of Alexandria never existed. Or the Pogruzhalsky arson, when the whole historical section of the Academy of Sciences’ Public Library, more than six-hundred thousand volumes, including the Central Council archives from 1918, went up in flames. That was in the summer of 1964; Mom was pregnant with me already, and almost for an entire month afterward, as she made her way to work at the Lavra, she would get off the trolleybus when it got close to the university and take the subway the rest of the way: above ground, the stench from the site of the fire made her nauseous. Artem said there were early printed volumes and even chronicles in that section—our entire Middle Ages went up in smoke, almost all of the pre-Muscovite era. The arsonist was convicted after a widely publicized trial, and
then was sent to work in Moldova’s State Archives: the war went on. And we comforted ourselves with “manuscripts don’t burn.”

Oh, but they do burn. And cannot be restored.

Our entire culture is built on faulty foundations. The history we are taught is nothing but the clamor—increasingly deafening and difficult to disentangle—of voices out-yelling each other: I am! I am! I am! I, so and so, did this and that—and so on, ad infinitum. But the voices resound over burnt-out voids—over the silence of those who’ve been robbed of their chance to cry out, I am! Over those who had their mouths gagged, their throats slashed, their manuscripts burned. We don’t know how to hear their silence; we live as if they never existed. But they did. And their silence, too, is the stuff of which our lives are made.

Goodbye, Daddy. Forgive me, Daddy.

A clump of winos with beer at a kiosk, foreign cars parked right on the sidewalk...I turn off onto Georgiiv Lane, which will take me past the baroque Zaborovsky Gate—there’s never anyone going this way.

In the fall of 1991, they burned “fresh kill”—that is, recent cases, Pavlo Ivanovych said, from the 1970s and ’80s. So there isn’t much left from that period. He told me this as if in anticipation of my unspoken question—even though I came for something completely different and wouldn’t have had the guts to raise this topic anyway: after all, it was Aidy’s, not my, family, that had brought me to Pavlo Ivanovych. I talked about the film, and asked Pavlo Ivanovych to be my expert consultant. With an acknowledgement in the credits and everything. The compensation is modest, but I pay by the hour—just like in Hollywood, yes, sir. I already filed for incorporation—VMOD-Film (VMOD is Vlada-Matusevych-Olena-Dovgan, but no one needs to know that) and sent grant applications to a dozen foundations; I brought the paperwork with me, and was ready to show it to him. I am assembling my team, yes, sir. Starting with him (but he doesn’t need to know this, either). And all for nothing: Aidy’s query went nowhere, Pavlo Ivanovych said.
Nothing, they have nothing in their archives. Nothing but their clean hands. And, of course, flaming hearts, as their founder Comrade Dzerzhinsky bequeathed them.

They don’t even have a complete catalog of their holdings. And how could it be created now, after the black-market trade in archive materials became, in the 1990s, SB employees’ all but main business?

“One could take practically anything. It’s still not especially hard,” Pavlo Ivanovych added modestly.

“Yes, I know.” (I’ve taken my share out of certain archives, why should the SBU one be any different?) And, naturally, there were individuals interested in acquiring certain documents. Oh yes, of course. And they were prepared to pay. Yes, of course, I understand. I just kept nodding with an intelligent expression on my face. My long-standing conviction that one day everything would come to light and Tolya Goshchynsky’s truth would not disappear from human memory when I am gone was collapsing noiselessly under the attack of his words, like the Twin Towers on a TV with the sound turned off.

Nothing, there is nothing. I can go ahead and reassure Aidy: there will never be lustration in this country—there’s nothing left to lustrate. But they built a new facility, well done. A wonderful facility, with high-tech storage areas—climate- and humidity-controlled and full of all kinds of other bells and whistles—to house the archives that, basically, do not exist. A new facility to store the black box with who knows what left in it. Unswept scraps, sacks from the 1930s arrests that never once got opened in the last seventy years. They sat on these sacks of stolen loot for seventy years—well done. Now that there are no living witnesses left, they can start opening them—slowly, one by one, without any rush. There is enough to keep all of them, those who work in this building, busy until they retire, and their successors too. Just imagine how the poor things had to hustle back then, in the fall of 1991, to pull out from this mess whatever had to be burned posthaste!

“They are the Tenth Bureau,” Pavlo Ivanovych said. “The archive service: select, proven cadres.”

So, does this mean he was also once a select, proven cadre? And is still proud of that? And Aidy and I thought an archive appointment for a KGB officer was like a mission to Mongolia for a diplomat....

I was all sincerity and openness. I nodded like a wound-up bunny; I chuckled like an extra at a Comedy Club broadcast. And all for naught: There wasn’t a case with that name, Pavlo Ivanovych asserted, they didn’t find any. They did look, he gave me his officer’s word (apparently, the word of a secret services officer, in his mind, is still worth more than a journalist’s or a businessman’s!)—they looked, but they did not find anything. Dovgan Olena Ambroziivna, born in 1920, was not found among the operational-search case, or among the agents’ files. He is very sorry. He may well be genuinely sorry, and not simply because he’s just lost his chance to appear as a film consultant and to make a buck along the way. He did genuinely want to do something nice for me: I must be one of the very few good deeds in his life, in his entire select and proven service career. His one “onion,” like in Dostoyevsky. Although it’s not like that’s exactly what he was thinking; it must’ve just felt nice, as he looked at me, so pretty, lifted straight from the TV screen and placed into his office, to remember the young, and also so pretty, Olya Goshchynska, whom he had once saved from being blacklisted when it did not cost him anything. It’s nice to feel like a decent man—meaning, translated into the language of Soviet realities, one who, when required to do a despicable thing, did not take initiative.

So I believe him, my Pavlo Ivanovych. I believe his officer’s word. They did really look and they did not, really, find anything. “But one should not lose hope,” Pavlo Ivanovych said. “It is still possible that the case will one day turn up somewhere.” I didn’t really understand what he meant by that—another perestroika in Russia, perhaps, after which the re-reformed FSB would again open its archives for a short time, or the possibility that the case
might be lying in a drawer in one of their senile veterans’ apartments, and would turn up on the black market after said veteran dies? Or on the antique market, why not—didn’t Aidy find Polish love letters from before WWI in a secretary desk once? Manuscripts don’t burn, as everyone knows. A wonderful slogan for the burners’ union.