The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

apartments. These are the apartments themselves, by virtue of their gravity, commanding people and fates: a home, once it’s built, always places its own demands on whoever inhabits it; and he who remains to live alone in such a big dwelling finds himself in an undeclared war with the place, in which he sooner or later will be defeated (because dwellings last longer, they outlive people), and then compelled to get out, and should thank his lucky stars if he manages to do so in one piece.
    Why did I never make a show about this? It would make a great show, even a series, and it’d have been a piece of cake to find a sponsor, a construction firm, for example. I could call it
Personal Interiors
or, say,
The Personal Home
—about how our homes rule our lives. Now that we have crawled out of our Soviet-brand hives and begun cocooning ourselves into our own nests, it is the perfect time. It’s too bad I didn’t think of this earlier, and now it’s too late. Your whole life can pass like that: blink—and you missed it. Those evacuees from the Chernobyl zone, the villagers who went back against orders—they still knew what a home meant, and probably could have told the rest of us, but I, when I made my Chernobyl film, didn’t appreciate this angle, missed it, wasted it. Moron.
    I know another home like this—endowed with its own will—that would be worth telling people about: it’s in Lviv, the townhouse that used to belong to Aidy’s grandfather, the one where his granny and Gela Dovganivna grew up. Aidy told me how when he was little his granny took him across the entire city from their neighborhood of proletarian high-rises to what used to be the professors’ colony up the hill behind the Vynnyky Market, to show him—look, Adrian, this is our home; these were the windows of the girls’ room; this is where Great-Aunt Gela and I used to sleep. After the war, the house was given to some KGB type—a “liberator” and, I bet, “a fighter of the OUN gangs,” who eventually drank himself to death, fell out of a second-floor window (the girls’ former room perhaps?), and broke his neck, ostensibly in a fit of delirium tremens. Only I believe it was the house that spat him out—chewed him over for several decades and finally spat him out—the liberator’s children made short work of selling everything off and emigrating when the Soviet Union fell apart, but by then Aidy was studying in Kyiv and had no intention of returning to Lviv.
    Aidy (who has long completed his studies) raises his eyebrows at me sensing a shift of mood: Is something wrong? (He and Baldy are swilling their cognac in masculine seclusion now—they’ve come to an agreement and it must be toasted.) No worries, everything’s fine, I reassure him with a silent nod. Everything is really perfectly fine; oh, if only you knew how perfectly fine you are, my beloved snow leopard—what a joy it is to watch you and be ravished by your calm, unhurried confidence: the poise with which you move through life has nothing in common with the impenetrable daftness of those who turn over big money in full certainty that they make the world itself turn. And I know now, I figured out what it is that makes you so unlike all those types. I could stand up tall and declare it to the whole café—listen up; Daryna Goshchynska’s had a revelation: it’s your home giving you shape!
    That house in Lviv, lost three generations ago. It’s like those little metal molds—fishes, stars—that I used to pack with doughto make cookies with my mom when I was little: you were packed into the house just like that—when you were still pliable, at an unconscious age, and the hardy frame of that house, where you always knew you could go and see the windows from which your young grannies once gazed at the street, is there, invisible inside you. It keeps your spine upright,
that’s
where all your grace of natural—unrestrained—dignity comes from. This can’t be bought, or cultivated, or trained—this is given like a problem’s condition, there are things in this world that a person can only get this way—by being given them. Or not. One can build a house, top it with a penthouse even, but it takes more than a single lifetime to learn how to carry that home with you.
    You are shit, Vadym. Good Lord, what unadulterated shit you are.
    This sentence comes together in my mind suddenly and of its own volition, like a barrel lid rumbling shut. (At the next table, the