The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

justified by the political goal of the moment, and the masses will keep eating it up. But—only as long as you keep pushing the same button. That is to say, engaging the same complex emotions. And you can keep pushing it till kingdom come if you not only have the means of enforcement in your pocket, but also the media—and Lenin didn’t even have television! What you can’t do, under any circumstances, is change the button or the whole machine will explode. Gorbachev tried it—and you see what happened?”
    “Vadym, you lost me. Are you talking about political history, or the mechanisms by which criminal groups co-opt political power?”
    Vadym cringes, but in a friendly way: he heard my fart this time and is letting me know that in the company of serious people it will not be tolerated.
    “I am talking about effective politics, Daryna. Have some cheese; it’s Brie, good stuff, fresh.... Politics is by definition the struggle for power.”
    “To what end?”
    “What—to what end?” Vadym asks, confused.
    “Struggling for power—to what end? To come to it, get it, and sit there? Chase away new contenders? Or is power still a means of implementing certain, forgive me for belaboring the point—ideas? Certain convictions about the way your nation ought to develop and, more generally speaking, about how we can all collectively dig ourselves out from the pile of shit your effective politicians have piled on the human society? I’m sorry, I know I’m spouting banalities here, but I do feel like I’m missing something.”
    We have never had conversations like this before, Vadym and I. When he called me out of the blue at ten at night—“Hello, Daryna, Vadym here, gotta talk”—and stunned me by declaring he wascoming to get me, I could imagine anything (my first thought was, something’s happened to Katrusya) other than this lecture on the fundamentals of political cynicism in an empty restaurant. If what he really wanted to do was to warn me, he could have done that on the phone. And yet somehow I am not surprised; I am playing right along, dutifully posing my questions. As if I were interviewing him for the cameras. (Do they have security cameras, I wonder?) As if one day I were going to bring this interview before Vlada who stands, an invisible shadow, between us: she is the one who left Vadym to me—like a question to which she failed to find an answer.
    Vadym finishes chewing unhurriedly, dabs his lips with the napkin again, folds it neatly, and puts it down beside his plate. Then he raises his eyes to me—a statesman’s weary gaze, a mix of boredom, lenity, irony, and pity.
    “Do you think that Bush lost sleep over saving the world? Or Schroeder, after he stuck his country on the Russians’ gas needle? Or Chirac? Or Berlusconi?”
    “What’s gas got to do with anything? Even if they’re all rotten bastards it doesn’t automatically mean that...”
    “Whoa, now!” Vadym cuts in, beginning to enjoy himself. “What do you mean, what’s gas got to do with it? Power is access to energy sources, my dear! Fuel is the key to world domination—always has been, always will be.”
    “I seem to remember hearing this before, somewhere—the thing about world domination...”
    Again Vadym squints at me with the directed gaze of an attentive, always internally focused person. (Where, where did I see this look? Night, darkness, reddish reflections of fire on people’s faces...)
    “If Hitler’s who you have in mind, his case is actually the best proof that having an idea can only undermine a serious politician. Really, ideas are counter-indicated. Of ideas, poor Adolf, unfortunately, had plenty—and believed in them, to make things worse.”
    For an instant, I despair: it’s like Vadym and I are speaking two different languages, using the same words that have different meanings for each of us, and I don’t know how to disentanglemyself from this confusion. And he is on a roll, words are spilling out of him, and he is clearly enjoying the process—how smoothly and evenly it all comes out.
    “It was from the Bolsheviks that Hitler learned the most important thing—the technology of manipulating the masses. And the button he found was good, too: national resentment, the Weimar defeat complex. Plus the same envy of the socially disenfranchised that the Bolsheviks exploited. And there he had it—the German nation of workers and peasants, and on an order of magnitude more successful, by the