The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

or stuck my chalk, at random, straight past the blackboard, one glance at Baldy is enough to erase all doubt: he looked as though all his sweat had instantly dried up all over him. A sudden change of seasons: a night of frost—and everything’s stuck.
    Oh, I guessed it all right; I bloody well did. He shouldn’t have counted on my ignorance of this topic—I have, like it or not, done hundreds of interviews, with very different people. I’ve got my own personal Google in my head. I even know how much they were paid, these small-time rats on the take like him, for their monthly written reports on what their charges blurted out after a couple drinks—sixty rubles. A nice number, twice Judas’s fee—I bet some wit made it so on purpose. Enough money, when push came to shove, to get you by. So he did.
    He is right about one thing: it’s true I cannot imagine how he lived. How he hung around, for years, showing up uninvited at other people’s homes, at the old-time wooden annexes, not yet devoured by the new developments, at the attics of underground studios to glean his shred of borrowed warmth. How he slurped the borsch the women set before him and drank the cognac, the cheap Armenian stuff—there wasn’t anything else back then, berated the Soviet government, viewed the men’s works and pronounced his unwritten judgments on them—with great feeling, I bet, peppering them with quotes, honing his style—and sweating the whole time: oozed murky liquid from all his pores like under-pressed cheese, under the weight of his secret task. And then trudged home—and worked everything he’d heard into a story for his captain. I can’t imagine a life like that. Or how one could endure it for years.
    He’ll write nothing about that “little-known stratum of our culture.” He won’t ever write it, no matter how eager he makes himself sound for Aidy. I could tell him this right now, right to his face, absolve him so he wouldn’t suffer any longer; let him stop sweating under his uneased burden, once and for all: he won’t write it because he’s already described all those people—in his reports. He’s already made a story out of it—the one others demanded of him. And this story has stayed with him, has short-circuited his memory. Because it’s always like that with the story; I know it from my own experience: you remember people, alive or dead, not the way you once knew them, but the way you told others they were. Doesn’t matter whom you told—whether you were speaking to TV viewers from the screen, or to a KGB officer in a room with closed doors: you can’t make a different story from the same material, zero out the first one, new text over the old. The material’s burned. Burned, charred, turned to ash, leaving but one trace—the bitter taste of resentment, the eternal sense of having been robbed of your due, the mouth etched into a mournful arc.
    He had his story taken from him, taken away. It was done with his consent, with his own hands, and there isn’t anyone to blame now. Maybe he really would have died if he hadn’t agreed—it was those who didn’t agree that died. And those who lived now have no tale to tell us because they’d already told it once. And, unfortunately, not to us.
    They should be telling us another story now—a story of taken stories. The story of their defeat, but no one wants to do that. Vlada, too, probably never heard from her mother about that episode with Baldy—and would Nina Ustýmivna even recall it herself? People often forget the evil they’ve done unto others, but retain forever the antipathy toward those they’ve wronged—reasons for this are found and fit into the puzzle later, retroactively. Vlada may have heard Baldy’s name at home, spoken with a bit of scorn, with a magnanimous chuckle, as one commonly speaks of ambitious losers, and may have thought him one. And somehow I find this unfair and hurtful—as if they’d cheated her, my Vlada.As if everyone, all of them, cheated her and were cheating her her entire life, since she was little—all of them driving her, together, into the ditch.
    I am tired. Good Lord, this day’s got the best of me. Was it only this morning that I was getting ready to meet with Vadym, rehearsed in my mind the prosecutorial speech I’d prepared about the girls’ show, made sure to choose the right jacket and turtleneck—the same ones I wore to see him in his apartment on Tarasivska, the day Vlada died, counting on