The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Market—you wouldn’t believe what turned up, what wonders could be had for a few pennies. Back in his National Bank days Yushchenko went there every weekend, like he was on the clock, and now he’s got one of the country’s best collections of folk antiques and is running for president (and God help him because those bitches got us by the balls already!—every day anew rule from tax inspection, they’ll squash us, small businesses, like bugs for these elections!).
    And my guys dragged stuff from that weekly dump without looking, like raccoons, often not even knowing from which side to open a snuff box, or that a Secession writing table, albeit crippled into a legless bench (which was what they thought they were buying), could have a secret drawer (like the one where we found a sheaf of yellowed old letters, which I guessed in a flash to be love notes—the letters were from before WWI, written in Polish, and that’s how we stumbled into a whole other Kyiv, one the Bolsheviks thought they erased without a trace: the one of Polish nobility that had lived there since the fifteenth century and thought the city their own, and for whom, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Vladislav Gorodetsky set out to build on Vasylkivska Street a new cathedral with the fashionable concrete puffery, only they never got any use out of it. I could not really read those letters, but I had this strange feeling they’d been written to me, personally—back then I was dating Tatyana and kept getting ready to say to her what she kept waiting for me to say—that I loved her; I’d even convinced myself that I did, in fact, love her, but left her apartment every time still not having said it, and when I found the letters something inside me cracked—I got this hunch, that ran wider and wider like a fissure, that the true love of my life was still ahead, and not that far, actually: the letters promised Lolly to me).
    For me, it is the world of objects I grew up with—I recognize their musty smells, the traces of tallow drips on their surfaces, the black dots on ineptly polished silver like dirt under the nails—as if I’m back in my grandpa and granny’s apartment, crowded with cracked ancient chests of drawers, and for that reason always sort of shadowy. When they returned to Lviv in 1955, they couldn’t live in the family’s townhouse on Krupyarska because it’d been taken over by a KGB mayor and his brood, but our family still managed to preserve some of its furnishings and wares—and in that, too, I was lucky.
    When the university sent me, with a kick in the ass, into the big world, after the instruments at the research lab where I worked got cut off for unpaid electricity bills, never mind paying anyone’s salaries, and I didn’t even have enough for cigarettes, and one day caught myself watching for butts as I walked, it was then I got scared, scared to a cold sweat: I had no idea a person could be debased so easily and that this person could be me! The entire social matrix in which I’d grown up burst like a soap bubble, and the only solid thing I could latch on to, to keep from going down with it, was that world of old things that my ancestors had preserved—my family legacy, why not? There it is, finally, the right word: I began to live on my legacy; I am, basically, just another rat-ass rentier—not a self-made man. I was simply lucky enough to discover I had a legacy—that the knowledge and skills that had quietly imprinted themselves on me when I was little suddenly acquired real value, measured in hard currency.
    Cigarette cases, candle tongs, pocket watches, lidded inkwells, and carved umbrella handles (ivory, be so kind as to observe!—I would say to customers in my grandpa’s voice)—I knew it all by touch. I could even sew on a Singer foot-pedal machine because I’d fixed one of them for Granny Lina when I was a teen; and before the market sorted itself out, in the boggy chaos of the time, I somehow came to command the reputation of a freaking guru, and once acquired, a reputation’s as hard to shed as it is to get. By the time the bog solidified and set like concrete, I was already on the inside and had my own two feet to stand on. Had I started a few years later, I wouldn’t have gotten as much as a sniff at the business without some venture capital, so yet again—I got lucky.
    And I got unbelievably, fantastically lucky with one of my first partners, our department’s ex-Komsomol organizer,