The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

is that in his previous life, before he became a serious person himself, he graduated with a degree in history, from Kyiv State U. A useful department it was, history: full of country boys straight from army service who paraded around in double-breasted navy suits with Komsomol pins in their lapels and signed up to rat for the KGB for the love of the game. Now the boys are all well past forty and have a new and improved uniform—an Armani suit and a Rolex on the wrist, a real one. And chauffeur Vasya in the SUV—a distant relative from the native village. Who are all these people, and how did they come to manipulate the lives of millions of others—including mine?
    “Have some sausage,” Vadym says, nodding at the plate of cold cuts. The slices—beet-red, blood-black, rusty-brown with whitish curlicues of fat—look in the glamorous light like Gothic porn—an installation of vulvas post-coitus. I think I’m going to throw up. Wordlessly I shake my head. Vadym, oblivious, hooks a forkful; a parsley sprig drops from the folded red flesh and remains against the backlit tabletop like an exhibit in a natural history museum. Vadym’s always had a good appetite—a sure sign that the man knows how to enjoy life.
    I taste the wine: a 2002 Pinot Noir from an Italian winery with an unpronounceable name. A sunny year, Vadym assured me when his lackey brought out the bottle swaddled in a napkin and, following a commanding motion of Vadym’s eyebrows, proudly presented it to me, like he was a midwife holding up a newborn for the mother to see. Vadym, as is his custom, is drinking cognac, but he knows his wines. People like him know many inessential things that nevertheless make life undeniably more pleasant. Would their life be utterly intolerable without this pleasantness—like a petrified turd under the milk-chocolate cover of a Snickers bar? The long-forgotten face of R., the way he looked after sex, pops up before my eyes, and I take another sip. Indeed, the wine is superb.
    “The opposition won’t do anything about this,” Vadym explains, moving more food to his plate. “This show won’t make a loud case,and it’s not good enough for an attack-ad campaign—not much there to work with. This close to elections they want heavy artillery. And your show’s just games, small potatoes.”
    “Human lives, actually,” I remind him.
    Vadym grows momentarily surly, as if I’d said something tactless, and sets to work on his salmon. I’ve noticed this habit of his before: not responding to an unpleasant remark as if he hasn’t heard it at all. As if the other person farted in public. This is what power really is: the privilege of ignoring anything you find distasteful.
    “And if that’s how things are,” I go on farting, “then what’s the difference between your opposition and the goons that are running this country?”
    Vadym sizes me up with a quick, short squint over his plate. (Where did I recently see this triumphant look—like a card player dealt a good hand?)
    “And what, in your opinion, should it be?”
    “It’s only in Jewish jokes that you answer a question with a question. I thought we were serious.”
    Vadym smiles mysteriously, then says, “The same difference, Daryna, as always separates people: some have more money and others have less.”
    “And you think there are no other differences that separate people?”
    “In politics—no,” he says firmly.
    I can see he is not joking.
    “I’m sorry, but what about ideas? Views? Convictions?”
    “That was good in the nineteenth century. In the twenty-first—been there, done that.”
    “That’s how it is, huh?”
    “And you thought?” he retorts, mimicking my intonation in jest—he’s got quick reflexes, like a boxer—and dabs his lips with his napkin: he has large, sensuous lips, almost cartoonish, and they make it hard to notice, at first, what a strong, willful face Vadym has. “All those ideologies that in the nineteenth century set the course for politics for a hundred years ahead have given up theghost by now. Nationalism is the only one that has survived. And that’s only because it relies not on convictions but on emotions.”
    “So did Communism! It relied on one of the most trivial human emotions of them all—envy. Class hatred, in their parlance. Because you can’t make everyone rich, let’s make everyone poor so there isn’t anyone to be jealous of! Isn’t that the way it worked?”
    Vadym does not like being