The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

political gorillas. And for me, everything that used to be called Vlada Matusevych is contained—like an ocean in a drop of its water—in this one movement.
    How could you show this on film? Even if you could, if you found it somewhere, on a friend’s cell-phone video or a clip from a birthday, a party, someone’s wedding—she was a fashionable artist; she was everywhere all the time, and there had been so much of her that in the first months after her death, Kyiv seemed deserted—even if you had it on film, what would it mean to anyone?
    I have come to think that a person’s life is not so much, or rather is
not just
, the dramatically arched story with a handful of characters (parents, children, lovers, friends, and colleagues—anyone else?) that we pass on more or less in one piece to our descendants. It’s only from the outside that life looks like a narrative, or when viewed backwards through a pair of mental binoculars we put on when we have to fit ourselves into the small oculars of résumés, late-night kitchen confessions, and home-spun myths, trimming and shaping life into orderly eyefuls. When seen from the inside, life is an enormous, bottomless suitcase, stuffed with precisely such indeterminate bits and pieces, utterly useless for anyone other than its owner. A suitcase carried, irredeemably and forever, to the grave. Maybe a handful of odds and ends fall out along the way (a request for pear compote, a sinuous balletic pas like that of a cat about to pounce) and remain to rot in the minds of witnesses and mourners, so whenever I stumbled into one of those lost, disowned scraps I was filled with a vague but insistent shame of my inadequacy, as if this piece, this accidental survivor, contained the key—the lost secret code to the deep, subterranean core of the other person’s life—and now I have it, but I don’t know which door it unlocks or if such a door even exists.
    ***
    I didn’t get this from TV, from the stories and people in front of the camera.
    There was the day when, for some reason leafing through an old pulpy book from my father’s library, I ran into a note in the margin of a yellowed coarse page (Soviet newspaper stock) in Dad’s characteristically dense, thorny script (sometime in the seventh or eighth grade my own handwriting aspired to imitate his, but eventually mellowed out, untangled, and came to resemble Mom’s) written next to the apparently innocuous, idiotic critique, “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively in sight of triumphing evilness. ” (God, the language! Still struggling to find its way out fromunder the debris of Stalin’s pogroms, limping and dragging on broken-splintered bones.)
    He underlined this critique with an impulsive, nearly straight line, and scrawled an equally triumphing
this!!!
with three exclamation marks in the margin. It struck me like a divinely inspired epiphany. In that instant I realized I didn’t know my father. He died when I was barely seventeen. I only remembered him the way he was in relationship to me as a teenager, a child, and from those memories, amended with a few cryptic posthumous (and petrified for lack of new material) remarks from Mom, his friends, colleagues, and his students—who seemed to have adored him unless they are all lying—I constructed a mental image: an avatar with the appearance of my father as I remembered him at forty-five, hospitalized and almost at the end of his bleak story, the kind not uncommon for his generation. And yet this man...no, wait...a much younger man (I did the math quickly: he would’ve been younger than I am now!) who read this book sometime in the late fifties or early sixties, before I was here (a mythical formula that inevitably prompts a child to ask, “And where was I?”), and scribbled his enthusiastic
this!!!
in the margins—exactly as I would have done had I found an idea I recognized as similar to my own, sympathetic to something I’d been thinking, turning over, worrying, living—was beyond the contours of the simulacrum I carried in my mind, as if the two—this one and the one in my head—didn’t know each other; or rather, I didn’t know this other, new one.
    This man and I shared, I could tell, a vague but fundamental kinship; I could see so clearly (from inside, as we see ourselves in dreams) how in that instant the pieces of the puzzle triumphantly clicked into place in his mind—
this!!!
—a snap like the sound he might’ve made with his fingers,