The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

bright-yellow dress. “That was our curator’s name. How do you know him?”
    “What curator?” Daryna thinks she must’ve missed something: The job didn’t exist back in Mom’s day, did it? What was there to curate if there weren’t any independent art shows or private galleries, none of it?
    “The KGB curator, who else? Every Soviet institution had its own KGB curator, it was a special job they had.”
    “Oh.”
    So in some way times have changed a little—if the meaning of the word has changed.
    “Boozerov, what do you know,” Mom mutters. “What was his name? Gimme a second, I’ll remember...”
    “Not Pavlo Ivanovych by chance?”
    “That’s it! Pavlo Ivanovych, Pashenka we called him. He was young, younger than me, he couldn’t have been thirty then; he was born after the war already.... Such a hottie!” Mom’s voice takes on a refreshed but clearly vintage tart disapproval as if being a “hottie” was an aggravating circumstance for a GB man. “He had that dark complexion, you know, and those big eyes like olives.... He should’ve gone into movies instead of the KGB; he looked like Omar Sharif. How do you know him?”
    “Met him at the Security Bureau’s archives, when we went looking for Adrian’s great-aunt’s case. He’s still got those eyes—like an Arabian stallion’s. He sends his regards.”
    “Fancy that, he hasn’t forgotten me!” Olga Fedorivna marvels tartly again. “So he’s at the archives now? No more tracking people for him?” She’s regained her composure already, like she’s fixed up, with both hands, her still-lush hair, fluffing it up with her fingers—a mannerism of hers, and Daryna can almost see her do it at this instant. “He used to have these long interviews with me, back before they took your father in for the psychiatric assessment—wanted me to, you know, influence your father. Latched on to me like a leech. We had a small staff at the museum, nothing really for a curator to do, so he worked me to pieces trying to earn his star.
    “Once, I remember, I got really pissed at him; I was at the end of my rope already. What’s the point of your meetings? I asked him. What do you want from me? It’s not enough that you ran my husband to the ground; now because of you my boss is giving me three kinds of hell—our directress then, we used to call her Ilse Koch among ourselves, was on a tear, ran my life like in a concentrationcamp: anytime I all but dashed out for ten minutes to buy a pretzel on the corner, I had to write an explanatory report! I just couldn’t do right by her. She wanted me out of there—must’ve freaked at a black sheep in her flock. Well, he sort of looked a bit ashamed then. Swore he thought very highly of me, and wrote a very good report about me. And maybe he wasn’t lying, because just after that the directress relaxed a little, left me alone. And he disappeared after that—they transferred him somewhere and I heard our museum had a different curator, but he never contacted me and I didn’t see him. I figured our Pashenka made a slip somewhere, because he was all sort of droopy and mopey in those last days. Said to me then that he wished he had a wife who’d stand up for him like I did for Tolya.”
    In her mother’s voice, as if plumped up from inside, Daryna clearly hears notes of pride. Perhaps, she thinks, that’s what kept her going all that time when she was alone? The sign, sent to her through Pavlo Ivanovych, that she was also doing everything right?
    “Whatever did they want from you? They only wanted to pin mismanagement on him, not subterfuge.”
    “Like you could ever tell with them, Daryna! They just had to get into everything, and spoil it all. Kept asking me if my husband had an irritable temper—he must’ve been collecting material for their psychiatrists, but I didn’t think of that until later...and wanted me to make Father take back all his petitions. ‘Don’t you want to live in peace?’ he asked. I told him of course I do, but I also want to respect my husband, and my husband would never agree to such abomination—libel an innocent person, and posthumously! I remember he blinked at me in this stunned way and said, ‘So that’s the kind of woman you are!’ I wondered, a little,” Mom adds sheepishly, “if he’d taken a bit of a shine to me.”
    “Hey, that’s violation of procedure! The valiant Soviet CheKa men were strictly prohibited from having any sentiments toward their