The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

national tradition that survives to this day—this compulsion to offer ourselves up to whoever rules the day—so you can’t expect me to swallow this kind of bait, strung like the Bible on a line of “begats.”
    And to add to your disappointment, love, I must confess that I did not observe any fateful switches clicking in me to meld your grinning mug with the oh-so-compelling visage of the woman whose story tantalized my imagination, nor did I sense any immediate spiritual kinship, or an exciting twist of fate, or any othersuch nonsense that could be interpreted, in a pinch, to portend the events that were about to stun us. Hate to break it to you, sweetie, but I felt nothing, nothing whatsoever, even if you don’t believe me and get upset, because
How could this be?
Zilch, nada. Aside from the momentary loss of self, prompted by the suddenly parted wall—a feeling akin to a vestibular hallucination, as when you didn’t smoke quite enough pot at a party: the world’s ablaze but the fear’s still with you.
    And to be completely honest, I did not really expect much from this new connection to Dovganivna’s family—even though I had begun to look for someone, not yet sure who exactly—because experience has taught me that the hero’s relatives, and especially those of the once-removed variety, are of little use. The best one can hope to wring out of them, with luck, is a few old photos from the family album if they haven’t been lost forever to arrests or searches, and maybe—with some special, incredible luck—a shred of an utterly irrelevant personal memory, something that Mom, or an aunt, or an uncle’s sister-in-law (women are better memory keepers) mentioned while knitting mittens or stuffing varenyki—a meaningless, accidental dollop of information rolling around in someone’s mind like an unidentifiable piece of a lost gadget or the cap, at the bottom of a drawer, to a long-drained bottle of cough syrup. A useless, random recollection that, say, shortly before his death the now-famous ancestor asked for pear compote, which stuns you for a moment while you search for an appropriate response: Is this something Proustian, a madeleine dipped in tea? Or they might tell you that the dining table on the family home’s (destroyed, naturally) verandah was made out of unvarnished planks of wood, rough to the touch in that way that pine is, you know—uh-huh, thank you very much, that’s very interesting, but I’m afraid we’re running out of film. Meaning that for the last fifteen minutes the director has been making faces at me like he’s about to vomit and sawing his throat with his hand, until his histrionics make me laugh and I lose the thread of the conversation—although in fact I find such memory garbage noless compelling than the story that we cut, squeeze, condense, spice up, and serve to the public in a neat thirty-minute package.
    Oh, I mastered that kind of cookery just fine and turned out my product with a practiced hand and my own feel for the ingredients. But these unwanted shards of someone else’s life, which could be discarded with such casual finality—and which had been so precious and full of meaning while the person was alive and perhaps loved in a way that made every such detail glow as a special gift—never failed to strike me as pathetically frail, like unearthed remnants of vanished civilizations. After all, wasn’t this about the only thing that remained
truly theirs
, something that could not be bequeathed or recycled, forged or refashioned to match new ideologies, publicized in newspapers and on TV until the last modicum of the departed person’s presence was stomped out, unraveled, lost under a thousand footprints?
    After the death of Vlada Matusevych—Vlada whose dear little face with its pointy, birdlike features was posthumously rebranded by glossy women’s magazines until after a while even I could look at one of her mass-reproduced portraits without having my heart cramp—I had ample opportunity to learn that it is only such useless trifles of memory that have a chance to remain solidly present, and I kept one for myself: Vlada, the very definition of petite, had the habit of almost touching whomever she was talking to, of insinuating herself into their space with one smooth balletic pas—her back slightly bent and her head held high, looking like an unwinding lasso, or a cat about to leap into a tree—which unsettled even the most recalcitrant