The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

shorts—he could not say the same about a brother. (What he must’ve had was a dream, a boy’s secret dream, an orphan’s dream of a brother, an older one for sure, who would come back from the front, beat down every offender, would protect and defend—and the dream did protect him.) In their eyes—the eyes of dirty, famished people who hurriedly washed the railroad embankments with steaming urine—the then newly annexed Galicia—in its eighth year of being whipped, along and across, by frontlines and now a guerilla war—still retained the glow of “Europe,” an oasis of unimaginable luxuries. It beckoned much as the new, Schengen Europe beckons today’s Ukrainian migrant workers—and to those who were lucky enough to make it, it bestowed generously of its riches: a sack of dried biscuits for some, two bags of buckwheat and a bag of dried peas for others, and for the luckiest ones—a packed, shaken-down, and leveled sack of flour. Mom’s older sister, Lyusya, may she rest in peace, managed somehow to carry precisely such a marvel on her back all the way back, with a change of trains in Zdolbuniv, and that’s how 1947 did not become, despite the Ukrainian plans of the mustachioed Generalissimo, a conclusive repeat of 1933, so the UIA can be credited with winning at least
this
war, one that’s not mentioned in a single history textbook. Not a single food-rationing crew in the late forties would risk going into a Western Ukrainian village to “shake down grain”; if it foolishly did, it would be remembered as last seen on its way to that village, as Uncle Volodya told it, with a satisfied predatory smirk, which still held something of the boy in awe of a friendly power—someone’s in for an ass-kicking!—but which also was colored with a tingeof resentment and something a bit like envy, as in, sure, easy for them to fight, they didn’t swell on the ice with me,
Where’d they be then?
Swell you did, I could have said to Uncle Volodya (and did, often, in my head, but never out loud), but that time was different from what happened in 1933—there was by then a large and, by all accounts, fairly well-organized army that had spent the previous three years practicing their bread-defending skills on the Germans; this experience kept the country alive.
    Aside from the Finland campaign, this was, no matter how you look at it, Stalin’s only defeat; and, for forty years after he died, the official Soviet history spared no funds or imagination to pay “the West,” as they called it, back. The funding part stopped being a secret for us—the sophisticated kids—in school, when no other topic provoked such heated arguments during the breaks: for our parents, the war was still alive, not something fixed in books, and the families’ accumulated memories diverged way too far from what we were supposed to memorize, resulting in a nearly chemical incompatibility, words and memories bubbling and bursting, finally depositing the textbook in the clear and despised category of “Bullshit!”
    And that’s really all that I personally could claim to know—not much. So the whole UIA thing had nothing to do with anything.
    I just
could not
leave the photograph with Artem. It was
mine
—it had become mine. And not just because I happened to have been thoroughly fucked on top of it without putting up much resistance. Instead, I didn’t resist because at that moment I was possessed by
someone else’s will
. That’s what it had felt like. (And for the rest of that day I could barely move, as if I’d been run through a meat grinder.)
    The young woman who stood with aristocratic ease among four armed men in the middle of the forest and smiled imperceptibly, the woman surrounded by a halo of light, a chimera of photography, had a name—Olena Dovganivna.
    And beyond that, I really knew nothing.
    ***
    “What are you thinking about?”
    “I’m never going to make this film. Never.”
    “Of course you will. It’ll all work out,” you say with confidence that scares me.
    Your family silently looks out at me out from the photographs, all at once. I can’t believe it. What did you see in me? (A question that must never, under any circumstances, be voiced, so I bite my tongue anyway, just in case—I wouldn’t want
you
to start thinking about it.)
    Something I never told you: When you kissed me that first time (actually, it was I who kissed you first—when I couldn’t stand for another second to be held in your