The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

that’s the end of any, as you call it, actual governing—exactly what happened in the USSR. And this Politburo of yours, a corporation of senile old men...”
    “It’s not mine,” Vadym grins, warming a glass of cognac in his paws. “But it does fit the definition of a corporation, I’ll give you that.”
    That’s praise—as if he were assessing my performance in his mind, like a judge at an art show or a violin recital. Putting pluses in some imagined columns next to my name. And this, for some reason, really pisses me off.
    “So then, this
corporation
of yours was made up of zombies who’d zombied themselves so thoroughly they knew nothing about the country they ruled! They thought Armenians were Muslims—remember that big shot from Moscow who let that drop in Nakhchevan? The FSB still can’t bring itself to believe that Ukraine is independent—they keep waiting for their made-up picture to come back on. Governors, my ass! Like blind butchers in a slaughterhouse.
    “Some folks I know interviewed Fedorchuk not too long ago—the head of the Ukrainian KGB under Brezhnev, he’s living out his days in Moscow now—with not a soul to talk to, his son shot himself, wife also committed suicide, and to him it’s all like water off a duck: like they’d catapulted the dude to Mars decades ago, and he just stayed there—spent all his life in virtual reality. By the way, it was on his watch they packed my father off to the loonybin.... And do you know what this mummy remembers before he dies, the most important thing in his life? That he put up a new departmental apartment building for the KGB in Kyiv: made sure all his cronies had a place to live! My jaw dropped when I heard it: what kind of a Gestapo chief is that? I thought he’d at least lash out at the nationalists he used to fight, you know, regret that he didn’t quite finish them bastards off, since now they’ve brought the great country down. But he couldn’t care less—the only reality he had and still has is this one: a departmental apartment building. A family corporation, like the mob. Beyond that, the world doesn’t exist for these people; that’s how they see it—like a picture they chose for themselves, and on which they can push the delete button if they want to. Not much by way of ideas there, you’re right! What kind of government can there be with ideas like that? You’re a historian, Vadym,” I resort to my last argument (like all serious people who didn’t start out as goons, Vadym likes pointing out his former “civilian” vocation).
    “You don’t need to be reminded how that corporate country burst, like a soap bubble, every time it came face to face with a reality on which it couldn’t press its delete button. That’s exactly what happened at the beginning of the war, only Hitler helped them out that time, by turning out to be a worse zombie yet—folks took a good look at what rolled into their backyards and went to fight for real. And in our own memory—when Chernobyl blew up: an idiot could see that the system was on its last legs, an idiot would’ve known people should have been evacuated from the contaminated area. But these zombies herded children to the Labor Day parade in Kyiv, and the KGB was running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, desperately recruiting new finks because it ran out of the ones it already had...pressing the same old buttons, as you say. Lies can get you to the end of the world, but they can’t bring you back, thank God. You can’t keep raping reality with impunity; sooner or later it will take its revenge, and the later it comes, the more terrifying it will be. You don’t kid around with these things, Vadym!”
    All of a sudden, Vadym starts laughing—with his entire body at once. His monumental bust in its Armani suit coat shudders above the table like Etna, with subterranean jolts; his face contorts pathetically, as if he were chopping onions, and looks so comical that I, too, can’t help smiling—making both of us look rather stupid. Vadym nods to a long-legged, long-necked, and black-clad young woman who has appeared, like a miniature giraffe, out of thin air next to our table. “Ice cream, Mashenka.”
    From his mouth, this comes out as warmly as “sausage” did a bit earlier. Mashenka, before disappearing, shoots me, from the height of her triangular face—a Cubist’s dream—a professionally manufactured smile, a mirror image of my own