The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

lights in the unused rooms. Doesn’t matter if some of those dreams turned out
not to be my own
, as if during my absence, while I was obtusely stuffing my mind with tax reports and client co-optation strategies, looking first for an intelligent accountant, then for a good lawyer, followed by reliable experts and reliable bribe-takers in the city government, and other shit, of which there was so much that the mind could not keep up and suffered from chronic constipation—while I was doing all that, someone else had moved into the unused rooms. Someone I don’t have a clue about, have no idea why he’s wandering around in there with his flashlight like in an old-timey picture show, showing me pieces of some unknown old movie, or what this has to do with me and my family. That it does have something to do with us I can guess by the fact that the family, too, has been frequenting my dreams—but in a bizarre way, as if in passing: Great-Aunt Gela walks through me as if I weren’t there and speaks to Lolly directly, like I’m no longer their
go-between
—alright, that’s fine, I’m not jealous, but it’s upsetting a bit, you know, who’s whose blood? Whose dad got pulled out of his bed at the tender age of three for a goodbye kiss, and then taken to Kazakhstan in the cattle car, on dry rations alone, so that when the convoy gave Granny Lina her half cup of water at stations, she held each sip in her mouth and had the child suck it out along with her spit? (Dad himself does not remember that journey, but he talked about it as though he were reading from notes—the way he heard it from Granny.)
    “So one could say,” Lolly said to Dad kindly, sympathetically, in the tiny living room, where he sat before the cameras stiffly as if in a plaster corset, afraid to shift his pose, between the Hutsul rug crucified on the wall and the hutch with the few unshattered remains of the old Korets china set (under the camera lights I was suddenly blinded by the pitiful squalor of these trappings of a Soviet home where I grew up, pieced together painstakingly from the splintered-off fragments of the old world), “that you were,essentially, persecuted as a child solely for the fact that your aunt fought in the nationalist resistance?”
    Dad made a small embarrassed sound: he didn’t find the designation of a “persecuted child” especially appealing—he would’ve preferred to cut a decidedly manlier figure before his daughter-in-law-to-be, and he surprised me by telling the story—I almost wondered if he weren’t making it up on the spot, at least I’d never heard it before—of how when they were already in Kazakhstan, in the settlement, he, a five-year-old runt, rushed to defend his mom against a guard, sinking his teeth into the man’s arm until he drew blood. “He got all mad, ‘You,’ he spat, ‘Bandera spawn, we’d do better to shoot all you fuckers’—but he let Mom go!” Then Dad laughed, pulling together the dense (so much denser now, I thought) wrinkles from his entire face, glowing just like his five-year-old self—thrilled anew with his first display of masculine valiance—and I saw he was telling the truth.
    “You never told me this,” I said later, to which he, still elated, responded cheerfully, “Forgot all about it myself, don’t even know how it came back right then!” That’s how I discovered that I am not the only one for whom Lolly can turn on lights in unused rooms. It’s her gift—drawing out hidden information from people, like pushing a button: Click!—and the light goes on. (“You should’ve been a detective,” I joked—“Yep, like Columbo!” she played along. We’ve already developed our own repertoire of set phrases and words whose only purpose is to replace touch because you can’t really live your life in each other’s arms—that’s what loving words are for, to hold each other with them—and now we’ll have to strike some things out of this repertoire, so as not to put salt into her wounds—my Lolly’s no longer Columbo.)
    Incredible how much of this kind of stuff, long forgotten in our family, she’s brought back into the light in this way of hers. And it was all gradually coming together—all the disconnected facts I remembered from what Granny and Grandpa told me, fragments of recollections, episodes unattached to dates, people who had died long ago or were scattered around the world—allthis was settling, piece by piece, into a chronological