The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Writers’ Union didn’t even send her a congratulatory telegram, but instead mailed her (imagine that!) an invitation to someone else’s reading — the harpy still, twenty-five years later, remembered whose—scheduled, intentionally, no doubt, on the same day, and that’s what it was like, being persecuted! I did not manage to get out of her any other details of the persecution. The harpy didn’t have a story either, only a personal myth, one that must have been promoted by quite a few men dazzled by the then naturally auburn tress-tossing, so that now the glow of their past efforts could warm her vacuous old age, in which she didn’t give a flying fuck about all those friends of her mythical youth who had perished in camps in the middle of nowhere, whose memory, had it survived, perchance would have permitted her to retain some sense of proportion and style.
    I left that apartment and fell to pieces. The vision of dragging my father’s made-up cadaver into the same carnival tent of “the persecuted,” where this veteran martyr held court, soured everything with particular potency, and I proceeded to get most ingloriously drunk at Baraban that night, downing the strongest cocktails like a sorority girl—but they all tasted of soda and salt, and in the morning the hangover reeked of the same, salt and soda. There was no story. I had to make peace with the plain, dumb reality: I was the only evidence that the man had ever existed on this planet. I had his eyes and his blood type. Come to think of it, why would anyone expect anything different? Isn’t this the fate of the human race?
    this!!!
—a scribble in the margins, a bauble that slipped out of the suitcase—turned the binoculars for me. For an instant, as if a flash of lightning cut through the darkness, I saw a living soul, and the strange thing was that it was the same father about whom I, against my best instincts, continued to feel ashamed. His only place in any historical narrative was that of a nameless extra, a statistical value—one of the myriad, if they could ever be counted, whose names were not listed by Amnesty International, who hadnot been arrested or sent to prisons, but who succumbed, slowly and quietly, in their own beds, to legitimate cardiac arrests and kidney failures, and other disorders, whose causes were clear only to their families if they had any. We could also add those who drank themselves to death and those who killed themselves—the only meaningful history we can craft for the future is the history of numbers, and the more zeros—the better. Six (Or more?) million dead Jews equal the Holocaust. Ten (Or fewer?) million dead Ukrainian peasants equal Holodomor. Three-hundred-million refugees equal the fifty-six local wars at the beginning of the twenty-first century. History is written by accountants.
    During the Khrushchev thaw, officials who issued belated death certificates to the families of those executed in the NKVD prisons came up with all kinds of diseases to fill in the “cause of death” field—thus erasing zeros from the number of executions. Another twenty years later their fictional cardiac arrests and kidney failures became real, as is commonly the case with useful inventions, and literally killed people whose fathers and grandfathers they could beset only on paper, post-factum. Another number was made unreal, and with it, an entire generation lost its common story, leaving its descendants no means of detecting a shared fate—from here, they all look discrete, just people who lived, died, things happened, you know...this one was a decent engineer and a talented lecturer who died from the side effect of a drug, having done his time in a psychiatric clinic with a falsified diagnosis—and that’s it, go ahead, tie those little strings into a dead knot. I needed the inadvertent insight to make the puzzle pieces fall into place—the triumphant snap of fingers, the blue bunny in a school sketchbook, the catchy, generous laugh, the charge of energy that filled the man—to see him from inside and recognize, in that flash, what it was that drove him, had driven him to the end, that had not permitted him to back off and make the single required concession that white was really black: his indomitable abhorrence of his own fear, the physiological mandate from his very healthy and apparently very proud soul (and the soul has itsown physiology that does not always agree with that of the body) to reject this fear