The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

where she heard the wailing that she remembered for the rest of her life. And that was her only memory of that grandma, because she did not, in fact, ever see her alive, not once.
    Baldy magnanimously aims the shiny circles of his glasses at me (and now he reminds me of Beria). “And did you imagine there was no UIA in the Khmelnitsk region?”
    “Was there?” Aidy perks up.
    “Was there anywhere it wasn’t?” laughs Baldy, a downright homey laugh (his tie has slipped askew). “I come all the way from Sumy, and I remember how my mom hid partisans in the German days! And then when the Reds came, I was told to keep my mouth shut about it, not a peep, because it turned out that partisans they were, alright, but not the right kind...not the Soviet ones. And where Matusevych was from, in Podillya—that was basically Bandera’s backyard!
    “But they had to have forgiven him, that uncle of his, long before; Ninél was there at his side, a living, breathing proof of rectitude—she came from the privileged, an apparatchik family, her father started in Party work all the way back with Stalin.... So then, she had a clear plan—to push her husband to the top. And here I come,
he-he
, a greenhorn, truth-seeking idealist, and plain out declare that Matusevych is rubbish as a Socialist Realist, and that he’s wasting his time doing something his heart isn’t in.”
    “Isn’t that a bit of a denunciation, too?”
    This slips off my tongue before I can bite it—I’m not quite sober yet, after all. But now, in the pause my words abruptly throw open—this silence is bottomless, and so are Baldy’s eyes as he stares at me, rendered instantly speechless, as if I’d just hit him with a right hook to the chin—in this silence that rings in my ears as though the entire café has also been stunned, lights changedand sound turned off, I finally sober up completely, the daze gone without a trace, like it was never there. Hang on a second. Who was it that looked at me with just such frightened eyes not so long ago? And why did Baldy get so scared?
    Aidy is first to come back on line—with an amiable chuckle: he’s getting a kick out of this; he’s admiring me and doesn’t hide it—he can afford to admire me, how awesome I am, how quick my reflexes are. And, since Aidy is the one who is bankrolling the evening, Baldy reacts to Aidy’s signal—and engages again, although he has to force it, creaking and screeching like a rusty machine, flexing the muscles around his mouth:
he-he-he
. I already know who it was that looked at me exactly like that not so long ago—with the same dread, a cornered animal’s hatred: it was my boss. During our last conversation, when I accidentally, just like this time, reminded him about the dead body buried on his conscience. The reaction’s identical, down to a T; the facial expression’s exactly the same. C’mon, mister, you’re weaseling around, skirting something—you’ve got something to hide, haven’t you?
    “
He-he
...you, my dear, don’t quite grasp the times, do you?” he declares, choosing to resume his magnanimous tone, and partially succeeds, only a few dry sparks crackle under his glasses in the wake of his momentary short circuit. “People took my article as a breath of fresh air! The journal still dabbled then in freethinking, for old times’ sake; it was the last little island like that, but after Ninél’s denunciation the publishers had their air shut off too. Ninél, you see, reasoned somewhat along the same lines as you just did,
he-he
.... ” (Vindictive, aren’t we? Put the jab right back where it came from.) “Well, you can be forgiven on the grounds of ignorance, but you know this women’s logic of yours. Women always rush to defend their own, in this they’re much like Jews...”
    And anti-Semitic, too?
    “There are all kinds of women out there. And Jews, as far as I know.”
    Aidy grunts his approval again—resigned to the prospect of not getting out of here as quickly as he thought. He nods to the waiter to clear the dishes from our table, pulls out the cigarettes he already put away in his pocket, and lights one up.
    “Could I have one, too?” Baldy asks, suddenly, and unexpectedly.
    He hasn’t smoked all evening. Means I really got to him. Got him good, looks like.
Ha!
Am I Columbo, or what? Time to take the initiative: “So, if I understand you correctly, Nina Ustýmivna decided that
your
exposé could harm her husband’s career, and