The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

that’s gone cold, and Baldy blinks at it in passing, with visible regret.)
    “That’s what Ninél counted on—and not without good reason. Many careers were made like that at the time—after the best and the most talented went underground, like I did...” (no, I didn’t really hear that last bit, that’s the alcohol finishing my thoughts for me) “the gaps had to be filled somehow. And, sure thing, all this rubbish pushed its way to the top, and the age of the talentless began. But, so that the difference would not be quite so obvious right away, they still mixed in a few of the old beaten-and-denounced; the ones who demonstrated contrition—as long as they were clean on the KGB count, of course.... And they were only too happy—Brecht was fashionable then, and he has Galileo say that it is better to have your hands stained than empty—remember? Many thought so, too: alright, let me get a little dirty, but in exchange I’ll have a chance to do something, in art, in science.... But it didn’t work that way,
he-he
! All of them, those who went from the underground to the officialdom, met Matusevych’s fate—and never created anything good again! They were left empty-handed,
he-he
.”
    So this, then, is the main justification for his life? And for his own empty hands, which, by his reckoning, are superior to the hands of those who ate better than he did back then, and he wants someone to recognize this. He must make a good professor, actually—he has a way of drawing you in. So much so, in fact, that I’ve sobered back up to that third-drink level: thought after another follows.
    And here I am, sitting across from him, some quarter of a century his junior, with my own clean hands, like Pontius Pilate’s—and feel my blouse sticking to my shoulder blades, and notice the stench of my own armpits very clearly; it’s not a hallucination. I, too, am beginning to sweat like him, beginning to ooze, his mirror image on the other side of the table, liquid from every pore. He also drips out of sorrow, I instantly realizeand feel, for a moment, remarkably perceptive—a protracted sadness like that, over many years, can make one cry, or it can make one sweat. Looking at him, I see my own future. Myself—in another quarter century, when I, too, won’t have anything left except persuading the grown-up youths (those I manage to latch on to) that I am better than my colleagues because one time, long ago, I didn’t want to soil my hands, and disappeared from the screen. And I’ll have nothing in those hands of mine, either, when those grown-up youths ask: And who exactly are you, miss, and what have you accomplished? Not one more worthwhile thing—just like him.
    It all goes around in circles, I realize, horrified (and repulsed by my own indomitable smell)—in circles, over and over again, the same thing in every generation, only the costumes change. It’s a special kind of trap: a whirligig of ruined lives. A Ferris wheel: you’ll get off where you got on. I can’t breathe; I’m going to be sick. Aidy, noticing or sensing something (my smell?), covers my hand with his comforting palm—thank you, love, yes, I understand, it’s time to go, but I have to hear this man out. Hear everything. To the end.
    “So Matusevych, then,” the professor carries on his tale, losing most of his oratorical flourish (apparently,
he
is immune to my smell) “had, at the time, a perfectly realistic chance of improving his lot, and Ninél spared neither time nor effort for this. Wore her own soles off making sure he’d get nominated—and why not, he was practically clean on the KGB count...” (How exactly, one wonders, does he know that?) “a few trifles here and there perhaps, a bit of this and that, dissident acquaintances in his past, but who didn’t have those? The important thing was not to keep them up, and at that, Matusevych was rather abundantly experienced! When he got married, he broke off all contact with his own family—lest someone remind him that his uncle fought in the insurgency. He didn’t even go to visit his mother—this, by the way, also upon Ninél’s insistence; she just couldn’t be too safe, that lady.”
    “Wait a minute.” I sober up all the way to the first-drink level. “What uncle in UIA? Wasn’t Matusevych’s family from somewhere around Khmelnitsk?”
    Khmelnitsk region—that’s where Vlada went when she was little to her grandmother’s, her father’s mother’s funeral,