The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

the thumb and the middle one, just as I do sometimes, in moments of intense excitement. And suddenly I recalled that he did have the habit of snapping his fingers and that it irked Mom, who told him it was vulgar and a bad example for the child, which made him sheepish—and this was new, too, because I’d never remembered him to be anythingbut very confident. I don’t think I’d ever heard him say, “I don’t know” or “I was wrong.”
    But something had been shaken loose in my memory, and another wave of recollection washed over me: one night I found the bunny I’d drawn in my school sketchbook covered in inexplicable blue spots, and I went bonkers—and Dad, mortified like a little boy caught red-handed, confessed that it was his fault; he wanted to make the bunny gray but just missed a bit with the color. At the time I seethed with righteous indignation; I could not grasp why he would’ve sneaked into my sketchbook and touched my paints—he who’d never put a drop of paint on a shred of paper in his entire life, who didn’t even know how to hold a brush!—and, for a long time, I’d bring up the ruined bunny whenever I needed to one-up him, because it never failed to shame him again. Only now, with this new internal vision, did I see this little prank as it must have felt to him, and realized that it wasn’t the act of spoiling my picture (for which I, the incurable perfectionist, still got an A!) that he was ashamed of, but his inability to resist his childish impulse—the sudden spark of curiosity, the urge to watch the paint billow in the jar of water, watch it fill the brush and color the white spots on the paper—and that he, a grown man and a
paterfamilias
, was caught in this momentary, unbefitting weakness.
    All of this was unspooling, faster and faster, one thing pulling on another, as if the inky scribble in the margin, like a loose thread I grasped, had led to a vast sunken rhizome—a lace of feathery roots that retained the shape of an entirely different, unfamiliar life, one independent of a daughter, a wife, or any friends—but I had no means of seeing it clearly, up close. He had taken his suitcase with him.
    I remember I climbed with my feet into the armchair and scoured the whole book, inventing a new reading method on the spot: not from left to right, or from right to left, but in concentric circles, chewing on the text, like the hungry caterpillar, beginning with the underlined phrase, “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisivelyin sight of triumphing evilness.” I had no other key—no other trinket had slipped into my hands from the suitcase that had already been taken away from me—nothing that wouldn’t have turned into dust in the twenty years since Father died. So I pondered
this!!!
, so casual in the margin, like detective Columbo scrutinizing a set of uncommon tooth marks on a cigarette holder that he’d found next to the body; the only difference was I wasn’t looking for the murderer—I wanted to raise the dead.
    What the book was about I couldn’t tell you under threat of torture, but by the end of my necromantic investigation I became firmly convinced that my father’s long “struggle against the system” (as we Ukrainians have been calling it since 1991)—his desperate knocking on all those imposing oak doors; his countless letters, complaints, reports, and petitions to the Kyiv City Council, the Solicitor General’s Office, the Ukrainian Central Communist Party Committee, and the Central Committee in Moscow (three or four bulging folders, held by strings tied into dead, eternal knots and stored in Mom’s attic); his trips to Moscow, each of which was supposed to resolve things once and for all, only every time they sent his query back to Kyiv and he had to start the cycle all over again—the whole gory mess that replaced his life and that finally sent him to the loony bin with the then-typical political diagnosis of “acute paranoid psychopathy,” stemmed from nothing other than my father’s secret knowledge that he, too, shared, like a shameful disease, Hamlet’s damned hesitation to act decisively in sight of triumphing evilness. And when the evil imperial machine rolled by, almost but not quite brushing him, it was this knowledge that prevented him from stepping back, that compelled him to throw himself in its path, and made him do so, again and again, each time recapturing the right to self-respect.
    And I’m still convinced of it.
    The