The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

this fucking restaurant, and why, once he had money to spare, he didn’t put it—toward his dead woman’s memory, as she had dreamed of doing (“when I have real money, Daryna...”)—into any of the squalid pig-farm barns our museums have become: the National right here, for one, where to this day they can’t give what survived of the Boichuk School the space it deserves; or the Hanenki, out of which you could, if you fancied, lift a Velázquez or a Perugino as easily as canvases out of a crashed car—oh, the list goes on and on! That’s what Vlada would have told him. But I won’t because I don’t have the right to. And he knows that. He knows, and waits, and squints with pleasure in advance—like a cat about to be scratched behind the ear by the mouse he’s caught. How can you not love the guy?
    “You, Vadym, are an amazing piece of work.”
    He instantly takes this for the compliment he feels due, swallows said compliment like a morsel off his plate—gulp!—and brightens up so sweetly that only a complete bitch wouldn’t feel disarmed. “You shouldn’t have turned down the dinner! My chef has three international diplomas, beat a French guy at a contest in Venice last year.”
    Dare I hope he is not about to take me to view those diplomas?
    “As I said, I’ve eaten already.”
    “And now you’re missing out; you can be sure about that. You have to join me for dessert, at least.”
    “Uhu, as my granny used to say, ‘you haven’t eaten an ox until someone saw you do it.’”
    “Mh-hm,” Vadym agrees, either because he doesn’t get it or because he didn’t quite hear me. “Our grandparents lived through some real tough times, what can you say...?”
    And that’s why now we take such pride in what we eat, I think but do not say out loud—1933, 1947—it’s all stowed away somewhere inside us, coded into our cell memory, and the children and grandchildren, delirious with the sudden abundance of the nineties are now busy growing new segments, like the earthworms—catching up for everything uneaten in the generations before them. Only it’s as if there’s been an error in the genetic code, a mutation that’s been selecting for the most resilient, the best at chewing and digesting, and it is now they who fill our city with the petrified refuse of their gigantic intestines: restaurants, bistros, taverns, pubs, diners, and snack bars multiply at every step like mushrooms after the rain, only dentist’s office marquees can compete with the eateries in their intrusive density, and if one were to stroll around Kyiv with nothing particular to do (only who now can go strolling like that, with nothing to do), one might very well think that people in this city do nothing but eat, eat—and have their teeth sharpened so they can eat some more.
    R., too, took great pleasure in talking about the delicacies he ate in Hong Kong, and the ones in the Emirates, and others in New York, in some stratospheric establishment where they don’t even give you a menu you just order whatever comes to mind, and don’t ask about the price. “And do they really just get you whatever you ask for?” I asked him. “They certainly do,” R. assured me with dignity. “What if it’s an endangered species? Komodo dragon brains? Siberian tiger steak? Or something more environmentally friendly, perhaps—charcuterie of donor kidneys, chopped out of some Albanians or Mongolians no one bothers to count?” R. laughed. And when I asked him, up front, how many starving people could be fed for the price of that one dinner, he took offense and called it bigotry. Although he, unlike Vadym, wasn’t even a bit heavy.
    This is who they are, these serious people—all those who, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, rushed to rake in never-before-seen capitals, first as cash knitted into their undershorts, and later as transfers to offshore accounts—this is who they are: the descendants of a pogrom. The kind of pogrom modern history couldn’t fathom, and which, for that very reason, it failed to see or acknowledge when it happened in its own time, simply pressed the delete button. And now it is too late, they have arrived—the ones who, as Vadym said, make up the best pogrom squads. They have arrived and will take revenge on the new century for the mounds of deleted corpses from the past, spawning similarly deleted mounds of new corpses, and never suspecting that they themselves constitute a mutation—a tool of revenge.