The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

on its associative heels, the aromas of whoring, wet dog, and alcohol from the night before. Boy, have I smelled too much of that. And how many people have I seen off to the graveyard already?—the ones with whom I hung out in this atmosphere of uncouth smell that no AC can filter out; back when we were all young, this was the smell of our jolly poverty, the air of Soviet dorms and sophomore parties—and later it turned out that our money stank just the same. Vovchyk, whom I met all the way back at the Sinny market, died of a heart attack at thirty-five; Yatskevich OD’d one day; people said Red (I forgot his real name) coded, he always drank like a fish. Kukaliuk even had me over to hisdacha—a brand new two-level, but it also stank just like that, only even more rotten, sweeter, with cigar and weed thrown into the mix. Kukaliuk complained that some politician double-crossed him so that he now owed everyone, like land to a kolkhoz—and next I heard Kukaliuk fell out of a train he’d never taken in his life.
    I throw the window open and suck the prickly night air into my nostrils. I may be losing it to insomnia, but for one instant, I clearly catch the moist smell of the animate earth—a sign that it has already awakened, that somewhere in its depths juices are brewing, running, getting ready to shoot up tree trunks...the first sign of spring.
    Gosh, it’s quiet out there. Not a single window lit in the whole neighborhood.
    I put on the electric kettle. And pick up the phone.
    One, two, three beeps...on the fourth one, the receiver comes to life—see, I knew the old man wouldn’t be sleeping!
    “Hullo?” He sounds stern, displeased—who’s this loser calling in the middle of the night?
    “Hi, Dad.”
    I can hear the TV murmuring indistinctly in the background and can picture my father as if he were in front of me—standing in the hallway of our tiny Lviv flat (the phone’s in the hallway, the TV in the living room), in his broken-in felt loafers with the heels folded in, the bookshelves behind his back packed with old magazines he can’t bring himself to throw out, and above his head—heck, I forgot what’s up there—a coat rack?
    “Oh, it’s you,” my father says. “Howdy.”
    As if I weren’t four hundred miles away but just walked through his door, the way I did when I was fifteen. I took my shoes off in the dark, tiptoed in my socks through the hallway...and froze at the kitchen door. Dad was sitting at the table with the nightlight on, reading—it was obvious he had not gone to bed at all. Howdy, was all he grumbled at me—and went back to his book, a bit embarrassed even: as if each of us had gotten caught in the middle of something he did not want the other to see. (I was in love with agirl, my first love; I think he’d guessed as much.... ) And now he is also working hard not to show how happy it makes him to hear my voice—he can’t show he is dependent on me in any way at all. Only now, when he is over sixty, and he’s got high blood pressure, diabetes, and podagra, his reticence has a completely different meaning. For the second time tonight, I feel my throat catch.
    “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
    “You wish,” he protests vigorously. “You know I don’t go to bed so early.”
    Early is before three in the morning. He won’t fall asleep until it’s begging on dawn, and might sleep three or four hours. He does not call this insomnia; he still puts on a tough show, loath to admit any old-age ailments, pretending that this is just the schedule he’s set for himself: he is a busy man, works until late, and spends his nights after work assembling the family archive (Lolly’s idea). Plus, he is very engaged with politics, naturally, like all people who are growing old alone.
    “I was just watching Channel Five...”
    Recently, this channel, propped up by the opposition in the run-up to the election, has become for Dad what Radio Liberty used to be in the Soviet days.
    “Have you heard what these goons are up to in Mukachevo?” And in the same breath, he spills into my lap everything he’s just heard on the TV (which meanwhile goes on muttering in the background, the effect of which is a surreal experience of something like simultaneous interpretation), about how in Mukachevo the powers that be are calling a special election, to replace the current mayor with their own puppet. I’m left making sparse grunts to evince my continued attention, not showing that I have