The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

get it—go on, move right along, nothing to see here—but this forward-chested stub of a terrorist is much less perceptive than a cow; he’s about as sharp as my Nastya, and he proceeds to showerAidy, verbosely, paternally, solicitously, with patronizing notes, with some utterly unnecessary details, belaboring the already belabored—that it’s better to telephone them, anytime after tomorrow, the more time they have for the search the better, not all cases have been cataloged yet, priority is given to requests for rehabilitation of which there don’t seem to be getting any fewer, not at all, quite the opposite, much has been done already, but there’s still at least as much to do. And there he stands, good and sturdy, with his thick, oily eyebrows and his hawkish profile, and bullshits and bullshits, and does not intend to shut up anytime soon, and I catch him glancing at me again and it finally dawns on me: he recognizes me! (Is that why he stopped?)
    Shit, of all things, we could really do without this. Dude, why couldn’t you just go to lunch? Damn television—soon as you stick your nose out in public, someone’s always staring at you, liable to ask, “Is this really You?” And not even to get an autograph, but just because, to confirm they’re right. I keep mum like a real Ukrainian partisan, not a peep, standing beside them as if we’re on a subway and not in the middle of the street, and focus on breathing through my nose, keeping my face straight as a passport photo—it’s not actually your face people recognize as much as your expressions and, especially, individual intonation, so I stubbornly drag out my pause, long, endlessly long, folks’d be shuffling and coughing already if this were the theater. And he has no desire to wait forever either; it is his lunch break after all.
    “I’m sorry; you’re Daryna Goshchynska, aren’t you?”
    Here we go.
    “And I’m sorry, who would you be?”
    Aidy makes a grudging entrance—like a double base in a jazz band, “Pavlo Ivanovych, from the archive.”
    Pavlo Ivanovych, sure. A purely KGB way of introducing oneself. I heard this from my mom: they were all either Pavlo Ivanovyches or Sergei Petrovyches, all those operatives, “guardians,” men without last names, just name and patronymic. For no reason I can grasp, this gesture of loyalty to the age-old traditions of hisguild suddenly pisses me off—I mean really pisses me off. I go blind with a rage that’s rushed to my head—or maybe I’m just slow to react today and there is a whole cocktail of accumulated ingredients exploding now, all my aggregate irritation beginning with Gucci Nastya (or maybe it was Nastya who infected me); but at this particular moment, I am just as ready to bare my teeth and growl—so furious my jaws cramp.
    “In that case, I am Daryna Anatoliivna!”
    “That I knew,” he says, regarding me as if a fed condor atop a tall cliff: the heavy, wrinkled eyelids half shield his unmoving protuberant eyes—eyes fit for an Oriental beauty, velvet and languorous, a pair of jet stones. What are they doing on him? A prank of nature. With a very slight emphasis, just a skosh of pressure, exactly enough to make sure his words don’t go unnoticed, he repeats, “I know it’s Anatoliivna.”
    Am I supposed to fuss, fawn, and flip right over? Gosh, wherever from, how, pray tell, I’m dying to find out? Piss off. Jackass.
    “Your matinka still alive?”
    That’s exactly what he says—matinka. In Russian, this would’ve been matushka—appropriate, even respectful. That’s how they used to talk among themselves—matushka, and also supruga
, as in “Send my regards to your good supruga,” never “wife”—“wives” were something the people they interrogated had, men not to be considered or given regard. But for their own: matushka, supruga—the jargon of power, the victors’ argot. How did I not notice that he is translating from Russian in his head?
    If he and I were iguanas, we’d be set in a perfect shot for
Planet Earth
on Discovery Channel: face to face, rearing with angrily unfurled hoods, waiting to see who strikes first. Or cobras—those also sway in the air before darting at the enemy, a lightning-fast whiplash. (I do also have Aidy on my side, calm like a boa constrictor, wise to keep his peace, and this, undoubtedly, gives me extra strength, but we’ll leave him outside the frame.)
    “Yes, she’s well, thank you. And yours?”
    Did I imagine