The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

that book helped me understand that he spent his whole life doing the same thing—climbinga cliff and leaping off. And not because he was some sort of natural hero, in fact, probably quite the opposite: he must’ve had to force himself do it every time. He had to break the shackles, to overcome “Hamlet’s hesitation.” At the beginning, he may have even believed that the whole case was a product of a high-ranking bureaucrat’s wickedness and, if someone could just remove this evil impulse, like a speck of dust from an eye, the terrible, criminal ruination would stop and he wouldn’t have to bear witness to what he called “the turning of a palace into a pigsty.”
    The Palace Ukraina was completed in the fall of 1970, and we went to the opening celebration as a family—this was the first palace in my life, a reality that finally gave shape to that fairytale word, something that matched the word’s dazzling radiance and incomprehensible, immeasurable scale, flooding the shallow lagoon of my child-sized imagination. Since then, Ukraina, the most palatial of all concert halls, was where I imagined all kings and princesses to live, because it was simply the best in its festive 1970 incarnation, grander than anything I’ve seen to this day—the Klovsky Palace was obviously not fit for even the poorest princess, and the Mariyinksy was still closed to the public. Ukraina was in an utterly different league than all those Soviet-era Happiness Palaces, which I considered to be nothing but pretense since they looked no different from the structures that house winter farmers’ markets. I have a vague memory (a view from the back of the crowd—women and children, on such great state occasions, were supposed to stay out of the way) of my father in the immense ocean of light that was the foyer, surrounded by tall (from my five-year-old vantage point), laughing men shaking each other’s hands and of my own proud knowledge of my father’s importance: “Daddy built this!”
    Of course, he didn’t really build it; he was just one of the experts who performed the engineering calculations, a newly-minted PhD with a suitably themed dissertation, a humble nut in a great machine really—if he stepped away, no one would have noticed. Several days later the man who actually built the place—the lead architect who had to have been there in that laughingswarm of Very Important Men receiving their congratulations and basking in his glory—left the office of the Central Committee’s Secretary, went to the bathroom, locked the stall, and hung himself on his own belt. His palace turned out to be too good for Kyiv. It overshadowed the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, and that was not just indecency and arrogance, but a grave political misstep for which the Kyiv authorities were getting their asses thoroughly kicked, and those asses had to be saved by making steps, taking measures, and finding someone to blame, preferably, by opening a criminal inquiry into the theft of construction materials, but when their best candidate for the role of the thieving conspirator so blatantly refused to play along—going so far as to hang himself in the Committee’s very own building—the inquiry, thank God and His new charge, was first postponed, and then disappeared altogether, as if flushed down the toilet, without a trace, so that soon everyone forgot about it, perfectly naturally, considering how often these things happened, impossible to keep track of them all.
    Instead, Palace Ukraina was promptly closed “for renovation” and its interior efficiently stripped of the tasteful finishes, and everything—the carefully varnished beech parquet floors; the dove-gray, worsted-wool upholstery; the stained-glass lamps—was replaced with whatever was cruder, cheaper, and plebeian, so that when it opened again, a couple of months later, with the acid-blue armchairs that are still there today, I did not recognize the magical palace of my fairytales: it was gone, disappeared into thin air just as a fairytale palace would if a genie picked it up and carried it to the other side of the world in one night. Only then we at least would have had the emptiness that alone can be a fitting monument for the structure that had perished (as Ground Zero remained for years, an abysmal wound among Lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers, but we have seen our share of wounds like that long before—how many of them gape, like knocked-out teeth, in Kyiv’s streets,