The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

remain between us.
    He has no idea that it is Vlada who at this instant is buying, with his hands, my film. The film I now know how to finish, by myself, no matter how much it will cost: I know now what has been missing. And Vlada’s death, too, will be in the film—it’s the only way I can tell the truth about her. And it doesn’t matter that the man who caused her death will have a different face in the film—the face of the man, the farthest on the right in the old rebel photograph. Because aside from the factual truth, grounded in names and faces, there’s a deeper truth of the stories lived by individual people, a truth invisible to strangers, one that cannot be made up or pretended. One that lies beyond the limits of pliability.
    And, as if it had just been sitting there waiting for the right moment all this time, a cell phone rings. My cell, I hadn’t turned it off, and I already know who it is, and my facial muscles melt involuntarily into a smile while my lips squeeze out a mechanical “Excuse me” to Vadym.
    “Lolly?”
    “Aidy!” I holler, so loudly the whole room seems to echo, as I break out from the dark underwater cave into the light of day. “Aidy, I’m here! I’m here, I’m okay! Don’t worry about me, I’m on my way out already; I’ll be there in twenty minutes!”
    “Thank God,” he exhales loudly into my ear, my love, my man, Lord, how happy I am to hear his voice! “Alright, kiddo, get on the road. I’ve got all kinds of stuff going on here...”



Forgive Me, Adrian
    B rew us some tea, could you please,” Lolly asked.
    “Chamomile? We’ve only got chamomile left; I didn’t have a chance to buy anything today.”
    “That’s fine, let’s have chamomile.” Then after she sipped it, like a gosling—hardly any, as if forcing herself to swallow—she put the mug aside and smiled: “We’re like a pair of geezers—sitting here with the wrecks of our lives drinking chamomile tea before bed. We just need some aches and pains to complain about to complete the picture.”
    Had to have been that fat rat, I thought, that Rep., the bastard, who’d gotten to her with the women-of-a-certain-age talk, the whole now-or-never shtick, up or out. As a client of mine used to say: under forty, it’s enough for a woman to be pretty; after forty, she needs to be rich—and made eyes at me, even though the old battle-ax had ticked past forty back when I was in middle school. And Yulichka must have just sat there, listened, and made another mental note.
    “You did everything right, Lolly. You did great; I’m proud of you.”
    “You know,” she said, brightening, “my mom used to say that about my dad, in those very same words: that he did everything right. Weird, isn’t it?”
    Lolly has changed. Matured? Knowing her and the way she, the straight-A student, reverberates in response to every blow life deals her—taking it as an instance of cosmic injustice—I was afraid, at first, to dump the entire truth into her lap the way it had landed in mine: here’s what happened, my love; we’re in deep shit because my secretary has taken me for a thirty-thousand dollar ride (and I’ve been an idiot; I’ve been such an idiot!). But whenmy girl, with her gaze turned wondrously inward, told me about the dinner she had with that fat Rep. rat, it totally blew me away, so my own screwup instantly diminished in importance: Are you kidding me? This is
war!
Unannounced, secretly creeping, real GB war, and no one has a clue about it—everyone’s got their noses stuck in their own shit and can’t even see what’s going on out there!
    I ran around the kitchen, smoked one cigarette after another, and shouted that something had to be done; we can’t just let a pack of hometown goons hand the country over to the Kremlin, lock, stock, and barrel, just because they think they can, and that this Vadym was an old Soviet rat for sure. I know his breed; I’ve seen more than my share of them—the ones who first cleaned out the Komsomol and Party purse and then made a beeline for politics where they could clean out everything that was left in state ownership. What was it you said he traded in, kerosene? You know what it’s called? Agents of influence, that’s who they are—the agents of GB influence, every last one of them, on the Kremlin hook, all these former rats, bitches, fuckers; we should’ve run the lustration back in 1991, that was the only way to get rid of these Soviet cancers, and