The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

crippled, poorly written phrase turned out to be his watermark, an enduring epitaph to his life, which ended just as crippled: try and fit it into the format of a documentary story and you’ll have to close with a drawn-out physical decline—a dimmingconsciousness, struggling against the clamor of excruciating pain in every muscle caused by the rattling doses of insulin which the Soviet criminal psychiatry (as it later came to light) dispensed especially generously—and you’d have to show that hospital-issue robe, the color of cornflowers, which I remembered him wearing when Mom and I were finally allowed to come visit him in Dinpropetrovsk; and his skinny, yellow legs with bulging joints; and his stiff feet that stuck out from under the robe, like chicken feet from a shopping bag (enveloped in a well-aged sticky smell of urine or unwashed skin); and a slow, murky turn of dull eyeballs without a drop of reflected light, shriveled like an old man’s (signs of constant dehydration).
    None of this has any heroic or romantic potential, especially when we remember that this dragged on for years, and that’s completely unentertaining, which is why such things get swallowed by “Five years later” or, in somebody else’s case, “Twenty-five years later.” Really, you can’t expect anyone to keep watching that long! (There’s no other way to make this kind of story into a film, no way to touch the audience—which means there is no story, no pitch, as any producer will tell you, better luck next time.) That’s the rub: my father’s daily struggles, in and before the hospital, not the days of his research and teaching career, but his battle with what ended it, and then ended him—the floods of letters he’d sent, the useless appointments he’d gone to, the whole absurd and exhausting war that was lost before it had even begun because once engaged, the system would not and could not yield. And that’s exactly what he was after, spending year after year in futile attempts to convince quite possibly the same people who had signed the orders he had come to protest that what they did was wrong. The entire narrative of his life, if we were to reconstruct it with documentary faithfulness—capturing all four folders and their knotted-to-death strings—had no point, only bitterness and waste. The point was in the epigraph, in the watermark. In a single, nearly straight line that was accidentally preserved.
    There was another reason I knew this to be true. Exactly a year before, on a summer vacation in Crimea, by Kara-Dag, I had sneaked away from the rest of our group and spent half a day climbing the same cliff again and again, like Sisyphus, and leaping into the water below. The day was still and smothering hot, and every time I climbed I sweated like a horse, and my knees buckled, and my heart clattered somewhere in my throat. When I was little, I once hit the water with my stomach and had been afraid to dive ever since.
    When I finally stumbled back into our camp at dusk, my legs twisted and turned under me as if I were hopelessly drunk, and it took all I had left to propel my body forward against the resistance of the air. My reputation as a daredevil, a thrill-loving adventure seeker who would do just about anything to get her adrenaline fix, had to have been carved in stone that night, and at dinner the men of the group couldn’t take their suspiciously twinkling eyes off me, apparently convinced that any of them could come up with much more pleasurable means of supplying me with adrenaline. A few of their wives turned unattractively skittish, which put a bit of a damper on the blissful intoxication I had achieved with the powerful cocktail of two substances that are so hard to obtain for a professional intellectual (Is that what I am? Can a journalist in our country be an intellectual?): utter physical exhaustion and pride in a job well done. “Whatever did you do this for?” asked the puzzled Irka Mocherniuk, the only person who really cared to know, and I said, “Not what for, but why.”
    I dove because I was afraid of diving. I spent half a day doing great violence to myself on an empty shore under the blazing sun because the fear, once driven deep inside, lived on somewhere in my body like an invisible iron shackle that wouldn’t let me move. I chipped at it with each dive, wore it thin and finally got rid of it. From that day on, my life held one less fear.
    My father’s note in the margins of