The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

responded with a preemptive strike?”
    For a moment, he doesn’t say anything—as if he were experiencing that strike again.
    “A stab in my back,” he says after the pause, drawing on his cigarette with the greed of an old smoker, his Adam’s apple bobbing hungrily—and I see how worn he is. Soggy and worn. And old. “It was a stab in the back. She, essentially, ruined my life, your...” he mocks with a caustic smirk, “
Nina Ustýmivna
. Unlike her, an apparatchik offspring, I had no protection or patronage whatsoever. They wouldn’t think twice about giving me time—and not on political count, mind you, but for a criminal offense. Vagrancy or hooliganism—like they did with everyone who didn’t have a famous name—workers, students, all the political bottom-feeders...not a mouse would peep. Do you even realize what it was like...” (his voice swells with an altogether theatrical pathos, it appears he’s getting himself worked up again) “to be fired because of a political accusation, for ‘ideological mistakes’? Can you imagine at all how an art historian might survive in 1970s Kyiv if no one would give him a job? How he might feed his family?” (Here I could have pointed out that I myself had once been a child in a family like that, and that our family, after they locked my father up in the loony bin, was fed by my mom. But I doubt it would trip him up—he appears to persist in the conviction that he is the only man in the world ever to have survived something like that.) “What it means—to beg around for small jobs? To write reviews under other people’s names for twelve rubles a piece and consider yourself lucky whenyou could?” (Something similar may very well be in store for me in the near future, but I don’t want to bring that up.) “My wife left me. She couldn’t stand it after a while; she, too, wanted comfort—as Shakespeare said,” he twists his mouth as if for another
he-he
, but this time no sound comes out, “Frailty, thy name is woman.”
    Shakespeare, Brecht—all this is also a kind of nouveau-riche gilding, like in their McBathrooms, all these quotes he pulls. He is not lying—he’s just bizarrely off-key, as though he were playing his solo on an instrument in need of tuning. Or is it this iresome pathos of his that’s ringing flat in my ear? You can’t deny it: their generation used up our national stockpile of pathos for centuries to come, didn’t leave us anything that could sound natural. Like Vlada making fun of her mother: “Nous sommes les artistes, maman!” Nina Ustýmivna, it’s you again, Nina Ustýmivna.
    “And you call it a preemptive strike! Perfidy’s what it was, my dear, common human perfidy! The instinctive response of a cannibal who bites off the head of anyone who dares stand in her way, and moves on without a second thought!” (I wince unwittingly under this verbal barrage—as if it were Vlada who had to listen to all this instead of me.) “She chomped down her own husband, too, and didn’t even blink! He never did get that award, not then, not later; they didn’t let him to the very top,” again he twists his mouth gleefully. “The competition was too stiff for Ninél, too tough for her to bite, and she broke her fangs, her resources were not immeasurable.... Bet my reputation—on that, the lady left her brand for many years to come. For a while there I was simply crossed out of life—in a dead end! Do you understand? Dead!”
    “And that’s when you were recruited by the KGB, wasn’t it?”
    He remains just like that, mouth not quite closed, halfway through an inhale: a freeze-frame. I can’t help it—it’s my professional proclivity for dramatic effects: as if I really lived inside a mystery series, where I’m also in charge of creating drama, and every time my trick works I get a small professional satisfaction. Aidy, my audience (the only one I have left)—also my view from outside, the director’s voice from outside the frame, the cameraman on theother side of the camera, and the makeup artist with the powder brush at the ready (how quickly did I invest him with the powers of all my old overseeing authorities!)—makes a short, glottal noise that could, if one were so inclined, be taken for applause. He’s so sharp, mind like a steel mathematical trap, that he’s instantly put together all parts of the equation, and even if either one of us still wondered whether I have, in fact, divined the correct solution